A much more engaging story, especially when it is clothed in Ionic mirth and grace, brought Zeus as a lover to another mountain peak in Arcadia and pictured the second divine birth in the country. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes, whether it is read in the original or in Shelley’s inimitable translation, is alive with that witty and audacious fancy which furnished to naughty mortals delightful brothers among the gods. On Mount Cyllene, towering above the other mountains of Arcadia and bulwarking the northeastern portion of the country, dwelt Maia, a fair-tressed nymph. Zeus loved her and— “She gave to light a babe all babes excelling, A schemer subtle beyond all belief, A shepherd of thin dreams, a cow-stealing, A night-watching, and door-waylaying thief.” The precocity of the divine infant is the theme of the story. He is not four days old when he starts for Thessaly to steal the cattle of Apollo. But as he crosses the threshold of his mother’s cave he meets a tortoise creeping along and feeding on the rich grass, a sight which moves him to laughter and gives him a fresh idea. This is no less than the fashioning of the lyre out of the tortoise’s shell:— “And through the tortoise’s hard stony skin At proper distances small holes he made, And fastened the cut stems of reeds within, And with a piece of leather overlaid The open space and fixed the cubits in, Fitting the bridge to both, and stretched o’er all Symphonious chords of sheep-gut rhythmical. “When he had wrought the lovely instrument, He tried the chords, and made division meet Preluding with the plectrum, and there went Up from beneath his hand a tumult sweet Of mighty sounds, and from his lips he sent A strain of unpremeditated wit, Joyous and wild and wanton—such you may Hear among revellers on a holiday.” When he has sung enough and is “seized with a sudden fancy for fresh meat,” he hurries off to the shadowed hills of Pieria and steals fifty of the lowing kine which are feeding there on flowering, unmown meadows. Cunningly reversing their tracks, and making for himself sandals of twigs and leaves that will not betray him, he drives the cattle to the river Alpheus in Arcadia, by whose banks they munch lotus and marsh-marigold. He kills and cooks with lusty appetite, in the serene moonshine, and then at dawn, through a silence broken by no step of god or man nor bark of dog, he goes back to the crests of Cyllene and enters the cave, through the hole of the bolt,— “Like a thin mist or an autumnal blast.”