Always from the very earliest records the goddess of the harvest was worshipped in this place. Long before the coming of the Greeks the Siculians had here a shrine to Gaia, the Earth Mother, from whose brown breast man sucked his life and food. And the Siculians had traditions of the Sikels making pilgrimages to 187Enna to give thanks to a goddess representing some principle of fertility, by whose power the earth was made blessed to its children. Very vague and shadowy are the traditions of the worship of this Bread-giver. There are hints of a great cave with a rude dark figure within, this idol having, curiously, a head roughly resembling the head of a horse, where the people timidly laid their offerings of the first fruits of their primitive culture. This figure is heard of later at Eleusis, to which the Greeks transpose the image and the worship, but the myth, so sympathetic to the Greek nature, becomes refined and spiritualized; takes on many new plays of thought and colour, and when the great temple of Demeter is built here the story has cleared and defined itself, and is hung about with the garlands of a thousand gracious imaginings. Our Lady of Bread—daughter herself of Zeus, the overarching sky—has one child, Persephone, the spirit of Spring, that dear vernal impulse which rejuvenates all the world and “puts a spirit of life in everything”; that is forever sweetly renewing hope of happiness. Persephone’s playmates are the maiden goddesses, Pallas and Artemis, and also those light spirits of the fields, the water and the air—the nymphs, the oreads, and the oceanides—but she is not without duties and labours too, for “Proserpina, filling the house soothingly with her low song, was working a gift against the return of her mother, with labour all to be in vain. In it she marked out with her needle the houses of the gods and the series of the elements, showing by what law nature, the parent of all, settled the strife of ancient times.... The lighter elements are borne aloft; the air grows bright with heat; the sea flows; 188the earth hangs in its place. And there were divers colours in it; she illuminated the stars with gold, infused a purple shade into the water, and heightened the shore with gems of flowers; and under her skilful hand the threads with their inwrought lustre swell up in counterfeit of the waves; you might think the sea wind caused them to creep over the rocks and sands. She put in the fire zones, marking with a red ground the midmost zone possessed by burning heat; on either side lay the two zones proper for human life, and at the extremes she drew the twin zones of numbing cold, making her work dun and sad with the lines of perpetual frost. She works in, too, the sacred places of Dis and the Manes so fatal to her. And an omen of her doom was not wanting, for as she worked, as if with foreknowledge of the future, her face became wet with a sudden burst of tears. And now in the utmost