For brickmakers a myriad flight of storks. One of the storks is given in Fig. 13. The birds in the original fragments are brilliantly and delicately coloured. Their vivid red legs take us to Delphi. We remember Ion[45] with his laurel crown, his bow and arrows, his warning song to swan and eagle. [Illustration: FIG. 13.] There see! the birds are up: they fly Their nests upon Parnassus high And hither tend. I warn you all To golden house and marble wall Approach not. Once again my bow Zeus’ herald-bird, will lay thee low; Of all that fly the mightiest thou In talon! Lo another now Sails hitherward—a swan! Away Away, thou red-foot! In days when on open-air altars sacrifice smoked, and there was abundance of sacred cakes, birds were real and very frequent presences. To the heads of numbers of statues found on the Acropolis is fixed a sharp spike to prevent the birds perching[46]. They were sacred yet profane. The lotus-flowers carry us back to Egypt. The rich blending of motives from the animal and vegetable kingdom is altogether ‘Mycenaean.’ Man in art, as in life, is still at home with his brothers the fish, the bird, and the flower. After this ancient fulness and warmth of life a pediment by Pheidias strikes a chill. Its sheer humanity is cold and lonely. Man has forgotten that Earth is a covering to hide thee, the garment of thee. There are two sorts of birds, two sorts of lotus-flowers, and there are two pediments. It is natural to suppose, with Dr Wiegand, that the eagles belonged to the east, the principal pediment. There, it will later be seen (p. 47), were seated the divinities of the place. Our pediment decorated the west end, the humbler seat of heroes rather than gods. There Herakles wrestled with the Triton; there old Blue-beard—surely a monster of the earlier slime—kept his watch; and over that ancient struggle of hero and monster brooded the stork. The storks themselves are there to remind us that the old name of the citadel was Pela_r_gikon, and that Pelargikon meant ‘stork fort’; by an easy shift it became Pela_s_gikon[47], and had henceforth an etymologically false association with the Pelasgoi. Etymologically false, but perhaps in fact true, for happily the analogy between the Pelargic walls and those of Mycenae is beyond dispute, and if the ‘Mycenaeans’ were Pelasgian, the walls are, after all, Pelasgic. We have seen that both Thucydides and the official inscription write Pelargikon; their statements will repay examination. * * * * *