Meleager, far away, was seized with sudden pains. He felt his entrails scorched by secret fires; bravely he bore the torture. His one regret was that he was doomed to die an inglorious death, and he envied the fate of Ancæus. With his last breath he invoked a blessing on his aged father, his brother, and dear sisters--aye, and on his cruel mother. As the blaze kindled by Althæa rose and fell, so his torments waxed and waned. Both lives flickered out, and his spirit vanished into the light air. In Calydon, young and old, noble and serf, were all lamenting. The matrons tore their hair as they bewailed the untimely end of their brave young prince. Aged Oeneus abased himself on the ground, with dust on his white locks and wrinkled brow, bemoaning that he had lived to see that day. To the anguished mother, too, came tardy repentance. Natural affection had now gained the mastery over anger and revenge. "Wretch that I am!" she cried. "To the loss of my dear brothers, by my own ruthless deed I have added the loss of my dearer son." Horrified at her act, she could no longer bear to see the sun, and with a sword put an end to her misery and shame. THE STORY OF DÆDALUS AND ICARUS BY M. M. BIRD Athens is the eye of Greece, the mother of science and the arts, and of all her world-famed artists none is more famous than Dædalus, the sculptor, the architect, the first of air-men. It was he who taught men to carve in wood the human form divine, as the images prove that the Greeks named after him _dædala_. It was he who planned for Minos the labyrinth of which you have read elsewhere; and it was he who first made wings that men might fly like birds. Of this, his best and greatest invention, how he came to contrive it, and how disastrously it ended, you shall now hear. When Theseus had slain the Minotaur, King Minos was exceedingly wrath with his architect for betraying the secret of the labyrinth--a secret that none but the king and its contriver knew. So Dædalus, and with him his young son Icarus, was cast into prison, and there they languished long. But Pasiphaë the queen, who loved not her sovereign lord and loved her favorite artist, contrived their escape and hid them in a sea-cave. Still the cave was little better than a prison. It was dark and dank, and they dared only venture out at night for fear their hiding-place should be discovered. But though the artist's hands were idle, his busy brain was ever plotting and scheming. One day, as he sat at the cave's mouth watching the seagulls as they floated past on poised wings or mounted from the waves and with a stroke of their pinions were high in air, there flashed upon his brain the splendor of a sudden thought--With the wings of a bird I too could fly!