At the age of ten, or thereabouts, he set out to find his mother. It was some time before Hera recognized in the lame boy, with the spinal curvature and the swarthy but pleasant face, the child she had so mercilessly cast off. But a spark of mother-instinct revived under the flame of the child’s filial devotion, and they soon became lasting friends and allies. Hephæstus, naturally, owed no allegiance to Zeus, and in the frequent marital disputes between him and Hera he invariably took his mother’s part, and so successfully that the redoubtable Father of the Gods took him by his lame leg and flung him into space. He fell for a whole day[1] and eventually alighted, like a meteorite, on the island of Lemnos, where he was worshipped as many a meteorite has been worshipped before and since. He put up with this for a while, but the blood of the Olympians asserted itself, and he painfully climbed home once more. This time he succeeded in planting his unequal feet firmly on his native rock, and he soon became a favourite among his divine relations. He undertook the reconstruction of the Olympian dwellings, and for this purpose established a wonderful workshop with a huge anvil and twenty bellows, all of which would work at his mere behest. The workshop was made of fire-proof materials, and shone “like a star in the night.” [1] This must be a mistake, as it would put the summit of Olympus somewhere beyond the orbit of the moon. He solved the housing question by building a separate palace for each of the gods and goddesses, replete with all the comforts and refinements of civilization. Nor did his amiability end there. Sometimes, at their daily assemblies, he would give Ganymede a day off and would himself hand round the nectar, producing roars of laughter by the contrast between his hobbling gait and the deportment of the graceful young cup-bearer. He became so popular that at last he was able to marry Aphrodite herself, the goddess of Love and Beauty, whom the Romans called Venus, and who was born of the foam of the sea somewhere off Cyprus. But this union of Beauty and the Beast was far from being a happy one. Venus was not satisfied with a “lame mechanic” as she called him, and hankered after the dashing Ares, alias Mars, the god of war. Having been warned by Helios, the sun-god, of the progress of the intrigue――after it had already reached its climax――Hephæstus lay in wait for the guilty pair with an invisible net, and having caught them, dragged them before the other gods amid Homeric laughter produced by their struggles in the invisible meshes. And when a daughter was born, whom they miscalled Harmonia, Hephæstus had his revenge by presenting her with a necklace which brought disaster to her and all its later possessors until it was finally laid to rest in the temple of Athene.