When Prometheus had caught some sparks from the chariot of the sun and brought them safely to earth, hidden in a tube, there was consternation on Mount Olympus. The Conservative Government of that privileged stronghold trembled for its celestial prerogatives. It was all very well, they said, for Hephæstus to blow his bellows in his workshop and produce beautiful things for Olympians, so long as he did it under proper supervision. But fire, once brought to earth, would set the whole world ablaze and consume them in their palaces. Hephæstus himself was not perturbed. Remembering the kindness he met with on Lemnos after his brutal expulsion from the company of the gods, he secretly sympathized with Prometheus and his race, and planned a closer co-operation with mankind. His Sicilian workshops saw him oftener than before, hobbling about among his furnaces and experimenting with every kind of ore and ingot. Wherever he went, whether among gods or men, his kindness and his merry humour made him a general favourite. Although he often made weapons, he much preferred to make tools and ornaments. Among the Olympians, his strangely begotten “sister” Athene was his closest ally. Like him, she favoured the arts of peace rather than those of war, and despised the noisy and swashbuckling Ares. When Athene went to take up her abode in her Parthenon at Athens, he forsook Olympus and removed his furnaces to Lipari, off the Sicilian coast. And it was in Sicily, some centuries later, that his great disciple Archimedes was born, the man who was fitted and destined to establish the reign of Hephæstus in spite of the strenuous opposition of the Roman republic and its subsequent imperial and ecclesiastical successors.