But everlasting laws are not to be put aside. The tornadoes which sweep the tropic seas seem for a time to reverse the course of Nature. The waters become turbid with the sands of the ocean's bed. The air strikes and smites down with a solid force. The heaviest stones and beams of massy buildings fly like feathers on the blast. Vessels are found far up on the land, with the torn stumps of trees driven through their planking. Life and property are buried in utter ruin. But the storm passes, the sunshine comes back into the darkened skies, and the blue waves sparkle within their ancient limits. The awful tempest passes away into history,--for it is God, and not man, who measures the waters in the hollow of His hand, and sends forth and restrains the breath of the blasting of His displeasure. * * * * * PANIC TERROR. In those long-gone days when the gods of Olympus were in all their glory, and when those gods were in the habit of disturbing the domestic peace of worthy men, there was born unto an Arcadian nymph a son, for whom no proper father could be found. The father was Mercury, who was a _Dieu à bonnes fortunes_, and he did not, like some Christian gentlemen in similar circumstances, altogether neglect his boy; for (so goes the story) the child was "such a fright" that his mother was shocked and his nurse ran away (Richard III. did not make a worse first appearance); whereupon Mercury seized him, and bore him to Olympus, where he showed him, with paternal partiality, to all the gods, who were so pleased with the little monster that they named him _Pan_, as evidence that they were _All_ delighted with his charming ugliness,--they being, it should seem, as fond of hideous pets as if they had been mere mortals, and endowed with a liberal share of humanity's bad taste. There are other accounts of the birth of Pan, one of which is, that he was the child of Penelope, born while she was waiting for the return of the crafty Ulysses, and that his fathers were _all_ the aspirants to her favor,--a piece of scandal to be rejected, as reflecting very severely upon the reputation of a lady who is mostly regarded as having been a very model of chastity. It would have astonished the gods, who were so joyous over the consequence of their associate's irregularities, had they been told that their pet was destined to outlast them all, and to affect human affairs, by his action, long after their sway should be over. Jupiter has been dethroned for ages, and exists only in marble or bronze; and Apollo, and Mercury, and Bacchus, and all the rest of the old deities, are but names, or the shadows of names; but Pan is as active to-day as he was, when, nearly four-and-twenty centuries ago, he asked the worship of the Athenians, and intimated that he might be useful to them in return,--which intimation he probably made good but a little later on the immortal field of Marathon. For not only was Pan the god of