Many of these brave fellows had been educated by Chiron, the
four-footed pedagogue, and were therefore old schoolmates of Jason,
and knew him to be a lad of spirit. The mighty Hercules, whose
shoulders afterwards held up the sky, was one of them. And there
were Castor and Pollux, the twin brothers, who were never accused
of being chicken-hearted, although they had been hatched out of an
egg; and Theseus, who was so renowned for killing the Minotaur; and
Lynceus, with his wonderfully sharp eyes, which could see through
a millstone, or look right down into the depths of the earth, and
discover the treasures that were there; and Orpheus, the very best of
harpers, who sang and played upon his lyre so sweetly, that the brute
beasts stood upon their hind legs, and capered merrily to the music.
Yes, and at some of his more moving tunes, the rocks bestirred their
moss-grown bulk out of the ground, and a grove of forest trees uprooted
themselves, and, nodding their tops to one another, performed a country
dance.
One of the rowers was a beautiful young woman, named Atalanta, who had
been nursed among the mountains by a bear. So light of foot was this
fair damsel, that she could step from one foamy crest of a wave to
the foamy crest of another, without wetting more than the sole of her
sandal. She had grown up in a very wild way, and talked much about the
rights of women, and loved hunting and war far better than her needle.
But, in my opinion, the most remarkable of this famous company were two
sons of the North Wind, (airy youngsters, and of rather a blustering
disposition,) who had wings on their shoulders, and, in case of a
calm, could puff out their cheeks, and blow almost as fresh a breeze
as their father. I ought not to forget the prophets and conjurers, of
whom there were several in the crew, and who could foretell what would
happen to-morrow, or the next day, or a hundred years hence, but were
generally quite unconscious of what was passing at the moment.
Jason appointed Tiphys to be helmsman, because he was a star-gazer, and
knew the points of the compass. Lynceus, on account of his sharp sight,
was stationed as a lookout in the prow, where he saw a whole day's
sail ahead, but was rather apt to overlook things that lay directly
under his nose. If the sea only happened to be deep enough, however,
Lynceus could tell you exactly what kind of rocks or sand were at the
bottom of it; and he often cried out to his companions, that they were
sailing over heaps of sunken treasure, which he was none the richer for
beholding. To confess the truth, few people believed him when he said
it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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