Even so it seemed to-day, for merrily and thickly as the throngs of naked little stucco cupids chased each other on the walls, infants of flesh and blood in gay rags and heavy hob-nailed shoes swarmed over the marble floor. As if it were a kindergarten small boys played games of tag around the columns, small girls trotted about more demurely, or flocked like rows of perching sparrows around the numerous altars. The church resounded with the hum of their voices and the patter of their feet; yet the old women at prayer continued their devotions, quite undisturbed, and no passing 219priest or sacristan did more than shake a gentle finger at some especially boisterous youngster. The sacristy holds the jewel of the Cathedral, a ravished jewel which does not belong at all in this ecclesiastical setting—the lovely Greek sarcophagus portraying the passionate story of Hippolytus and Phædra. This is the one remnant now left to Akragas out of all her treasures of Greek art. Found in the temple of Concord, where the gentle St. Gregory had probably cherished it, the Girgentians offered it to their Cathedral, and in that most tolerant of churches it served for long as the High Altar until influx of the outer world made some sense of its incongruity felt even here. At one end of the tomb Phædra swoons amourously among her maidens, their delicate little round child-like faces and soft-draped forms melting into the background in exquisite low relief. Two of a more stately beauty hold up the Queen’s limp arms and support her as she confesses to her old nurse the secret passion consuming her for that god-like boy, son of her own husband, whom with all her fiery blood she had once hated as illegitimate rival to her own children, but now had come to find so dear that she “loved the very touch of his fleecy coat”—that simple grey-and-white homespun his Amazon mother’s loving fingers had woven. In high bold relief of interlacing trees Hippolytus on the other side hunts as joyously as his patroness Artemis herself. Opposite, arrested among his dogs and companions, he stands in the clear purity of his young beauty, like “the water from the brook or the wild flowers of the morning, or the beams of the morning star turned to human flesh,” turning away his head from the bent shrunken form of the old 220nurse pleading her shameful embassy. And on the other end is carved the tragedy of his death, the revenge of Aphrodite in anger at his obduracy against herself and her votary Phædra. “Through all the perils of darkness he had guided the chariot safely along the curved shore; the dawn was come, and a little breeze astir as the grey level spaces parted delicately into white and blue, when angry Aphrodite awoke from the deep betimes, rent the tranquil surface; a great wave leapt suddenly into the placid distance of the little shore, and was surging here to the very necks of the plunging horses, a moment since enjoying so pleasantly with him the caress of the morning