Again, Pausanias loves to notice the things, whether worshipped or not, which were treasured as relics of a mythical or legendary past. Such were the remains of the clay out of which Prometheus had moulded the first man and woman; the stone that Cronus had swallowed instead of his infant son; the remains of the wild-strawberry tree under which Hermes had been nourished; the egg which the lovely Leda had laid and out of which Castor and Pollux had been hatched; the ruins of the bridal chamber where Zeus had dallied with Semele; the mouldering hide of the Calydonian boar; and the old wooden pillar, held together by bands and protected from the weather by a shed, which had stood in the house of Oenomaus. In the temple of Artemis at Aulis, now represented by a ruined Byzantine chapel in a bare stony field, the traveller was shown the remains of the plane-tree under which the Greeks had sacrificed before setting sail for Troy, and on a neighbouring hill the guides pointed out the bronze threshold of Agamemnon’s hut. But the most revered of all the relics described by Pausanias seems to have been the sceptre which Hephaestus was said to have made and Agamemnon to have wielded. It was kept and worshipped at Chaeronea. A priest who held office for a year guarded the precious relic in his house and offered sacrifices to it daily, while a table covered with flesh and cakes stood constantly beside it. A ruder conception of religion than is revealed by this practice of adoring and feeding a staff it might be hard to discover amongst the lowest fetish-worshippers of Western Africa. And this practice was carried on in the native city and in the lifetime of the enlightened Plutarch! Truly the extremes of human nature sometimes jostle each other in the street. [Sidenote: His notices of historic monuments.]