in one of the Homeric Hymns Aphrodite rehearses to Anchises the whole matter[397]. Speaking of the son whom she will bear to him, she says: ‘So soon as he shall see the light of the sun, he shall be tended by deep-bosomed nymphs of the mountains, even those that dwell upon this high and holy mount. These verily are neither of mortal men nor of immortal gods. Long indeed they live and feed on food divine, and they have strength too for fair dance amid immortals; yea, and with them have the watchful Slayer of Argus and such as Silenus been joined in love within the depths of pleasant grots. But at the moment of their birth, there spring up upon the nurturing earth pines, may be, or oaks rearing high their heads, good trees and luxuriant, upon the mountain-heights. Far aloft they tower; sanctuaries of immortals they are called, and men hew them not with axe[398]. But so soon as the doom of death stands beside them, first the good trees are dried up at the root and then their bark withers about them and their branches fall away, and therewith the soul of the nymphs too leaves the light of the sun.’ So my Arcadian friend was true to ancient tradition both in his estimate of the life of Nereids and in his belief, thereby implied, that they are mortal. Nor is other modern testimony wanting. There are popular stories still current concerning Nereids’ deaths. One has been recorded in which a Nereid is struck by God with lightning and slain as a punishment for stealing a boy from his father, and her sister nymphs in terror restore the child[399]. A pertinent confession of faith has also been heard from the lips of a Cretan peasant. In explanation of the name Νεραϊδόσπηλος, ‘Nereid-grot,’ attached to a cave near his village, he had related a story of a Nereid who was carried off from that spot and taken to wife by a young man, to whom she bore a son; but as she would never open her lips in his presence, he went in despair to an old woman who advised him to heat an oven hot and then taking the child in his arms to say to the Nereid, ‘Speak to me; or I will burn your child,’ and so saying to make show of throwing the child into the oven. He did as the old woman advised; but the Nereid saying only, ‘You hound, leave my child alone,’ seized it from him and disappeared. And since the other Nereids would not admit her again to their company in the cave, as being now a mother, she took up her abode in a spring close by; and there she is seen two or three times a year holding the child in her arms. ‘After hearing this tale,’ says the recorder of it, ‘I asked the old peasant who told it me, how long ago this had happened.’ He replied that he had heard it from his grandfather, and guessed it to be about a hundred and sixty years. ‘My good man,’ said the other, ‘would not the child have grown up in all that time?’ ‘What do you suppose, sir?’ he answered; ‘are those to grow up so easily who live from a thousand to fifteen hundred years?[400]’