Down the path rushed Orpheus, clamoring for his Eurydice lost a second time; but vain was all his grief, for not again would Charon row him across the Styx. So the singer returned to earth, his heart broken, and all joy gone from his life. Thenceforth his one consolation was to sit upon Mount Rhodope singing his love and his loss. And the Thracian women, worshipers of Bacchus, kindling at his strains, called to him to join in their wild rites. But when he turned from them with loathing, they fell upon him, tearing him limb from limb. And his head they cast into the river Hebrus, whose banks bore to the Ægean Sea that long-drawn wail: "Eurydice, Eurydice!" And still as we hear the music of that sweet name we think of "infinite passion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn." But the gods, first punishing the Thracian women by turning them into trees, took the lyre of Orpheus and set it among the stars. And Orpheus himself, once more entering by the gate of death the regions of the dead, seeks and finds his beloved Eurydice. Now may they walk side by side, now Orpheus, if he goes before, may look back in safety upon the face of his loved one. For the sorrows of life are over and the pangs of death are past, and no shadow of parting can come between the singer and his love in the Elysium of the Blessed. HERCULES AND THE GOLDEN APPLES PART I. HERCULES AND THE OLD MAN OF THE SEA BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE Did you ever hear of the golden apples that grew in the garden of the Hesperides? Ah, those were such apples as would bring a great price by the bushel, if any of them could be found growing in the orchards of nowadays! But there is not, I suppose, a graft of that wonderful fruit on a single tree in the wide world. Not so much as a seed of those apples exists any longer. And even in the old, old, half-forgotten times, before the garden of the Hesperides was overrun with weeds, many doubted whether there could be real trees that bore apples of solid gold upon their branches. All had heard of them, but nobody remembered to have seen any. Children, nevertheless, used to listen, open-mouthed, to stories of the golden apple tree, and resolved to discover it when they should be big enough. Adventurous young men, who desired to do a braver thing than any of their fellows, set out in quest of this fruit. Many of them returned no more; none of them brought back the apples. No wonder that they found it impossible to gather them! It is said that there was a dragon beneath the tree, with a hundred terrible heads, fifty of which were always on the watch while the other fifty slept.