museum of Athens, a singularly refined bas-relief, in which he stands, a firm and serious youth, between Demeter and [108] Persephone, who places her hand as with some sacred influence, and consecrating gesture, upon him. But the house of the prudent countryman will be, of course, a place of honest manners; and Demeter Thesmophoros is the guardian of married life, the deity of the discretion of wives. She is therefore the founder of civilised order. The peaceful homes of men, scattered about the land, in their security--Demeter represents these fruits of the earth also, not without a suggestion of the white cities, which shine upon the hills above the waving fields of corn, seats of justice and of true kingship. She is also in a certain sense the patron of travellers, having, in her long wanderings after Persephone, recorded and handed down those omens, caught from little things--the birds which crossed her path, the persons who met her on the way, the words they said, the things they carried in their hands, einodia symbola+--by noting which, men bring their journeys to a successful end; so that the simple countryman may pass securely on his way; and is led by signs from the goddess herself, when he travels far to visit her, at Hermione or Eleusis. So far the attributes of Demeter and Kore are similar. In the mythical conception, as in the religious acts connected with it, the mother and the daughter are almost interchangeable; [109] they are the two goddesses, the twin-named. Gradually, the office of Persephone is developed, defines itself; functions distinct from those of Demeter are attributed to her. Hitherto, always at the side of Demeter and sharing her worship, she now appears detached from her, going and coming, on her mysterious business. A third part of the year she abides in darkness; she comes up in the spring; and every autumn, when the countryman sows his seed in the earth, she descends thither again, and the world of the dead lies open, spring and autumn, to let her in and out. Persephone, then, is the summer- time, and, in this sense, a daughter of the earth; but the summer as bringing winter; the flowery splendour and consummated glory of the year, as thereafter immediately beginning to draw near to its end, as the first yellow leaf crosses it, in the first severer wind. She is the last day of spring, or the first day of autumn, in the threefold division of the Greek year. Her story is, indeed, but the story, in an intenser form, of Adonis, of Hyacinth, of Adrastus--the king's blooming son, fated, in the story of Herodotus, to be wounded to death with an iron spear--of Linus, a fair child who is torn to pieces by hounds every spring-time--of the English Sleeping Beauty. From being the goddess of summer and the flowers, she becomes the goddess of night and sleep and death, confuseable with Hecate, the goddess of midnight [110] terrors--Korê arrêtos,+ the mother of the