"No, Cadmus," said the same voice that had spoken to him in the field of
the armed men, "this is not that dear sister Europa whom you have sought
so faithfully all over the wide world. This is Harmonia, a daughter of
the sky, who is given you instead of sister, and brothers, and friend,
and mother. You will find all those dear ones in her alone."
So King Cadmus dwelt in the palace, with his new friend Harmonia,
and found a great deal of comfort in his magnificent abode, but would
doubtless have found as much, if not more, in the humblest cottage by
the wayside. Before many years went by, there was a group of rosy little
children (but how they came thither has always been a mystery to me)
sporting in the great hall, and on the marble steps of the palace, and
running joyfully to meet King Cadmus when affairs of state left him at
leisure to play with them. They called him father, and Queen Harmonia
mother. The five old soldiers of the dragon's teeth grew very fond
of these small urchins, and were never weary of showing them how to
shoulder sticks, flourish wooden swords, and march in military order,
blowing a penny trumpet, or beating an abominable rub-a-dub upon a
little drum.
But King Cadmus, lest there should be too much of the dragon's tooth in
his children's disposition, used to find time from his kingly duties
to teach them their A B C--which he invented for their benefit, and for
which many little people, I am afraid, are not half so grateful to him
as they ought to be.
CIRCE'S PALACE.
Some of you have heard, no doubt, of the wise King Ulysses, and how he
went to the siege of Troy, and how, after that famous city was taken and
burned, he spent ten long years in trying to get back again to his
own little kingdom of Ithaca. At one time in the course of this weary
voyage, he arrived at an island that looked very green and pleasant, but
the name of which was unknown to him. For, only a little while before
he came thither, he had met with a terrible hurricane, or rather a great
many hurricanes at once, which drove his fleet of vessels into a strange
part of the sea, where neither himself nor any of his mariners had ever
sailed. This misfortune was entirely owing to the foolish curiosity of
his shipmates, who, while Ulysses lay asleep, had untied some very
bulky leathern bags, in which they supposed a valuable treasure to be
concealed. But in each of these stout bags, King Aeolus, the ruler of
the winds, had tied up a tempest, and had given it to Ulysses to keep in
order that he might be sure of a favorable passage homeward to Ithaca;
and when the strings were loosened, forth rushed the whistling blasts,
like air out of a blown bladder, whitening the sea with foam, and
scattering the vessels nobody could tell whither.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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