As we have abundantly seen, the first food of the child is the "food of the gods," for so were honey and milk esteemed among the ancient Germans, Greeks, Slavs, Hindus, etc., and of the Paradise where dwelt the Gods, and into which it was fabled children were born, we have some recollection, as Ploss suggests, in the familiar "land flowing with milk and honey," into the possession of which the children of Israel entered after their long wandering in the wilderness (462. II. 696). Of the ancient Hindu god Agni, Letourneau (100. 315) observes: "After being for a long time fed upon melted butter and the alcoholic liquor from the acid asclepias, the sacred Sôma, he first became a glorious child, then a metaphysical divinity, a mediator living in the fathers and living again in the sons." It was the divine _Sôma_ that, like the nectar of the Greeks, the elixirs of the Scandinavians, conferred youth and immortality upon those who drank it. According to Moslem legend, after his birth, Abraham "remained concealed in a cave during fifteen months, and his mother visited him sometimes to nurse him. But he had no need of her food, for Allah commanded water to flow from one of Abraham's fingers, milk from another, honey from the third, the juice of dates from the fourth, and butter from the fifth" (547. 69). _Poison_. In the _Gesta Romanorum_ (Cap. XI.) we read of the "Queen of the North," who "nourished her daughter from the cradle upon a certain kind of deadly poison; and when she grew up, she was considered so beautiful, that the sight of her alone affected one with madness." Moreover, her whole nature had become so imbued with poisons that "she herself had become the deadliest poison in existence. Poison was her element of life. With that rich perfume of her breath she blasted the very air. Her love would have been poison, her embrace death." Hawthorne's story of "Rappaccini's Daughter,"--"who ever since infancy had grown and blossomed with the plants whose fatal properties she had imbibed with the air she breathed,"--comes from the same original source (390. II. 172). Here we are taken back again to the Golden Age, when even poisons could be eaten without harm. _Priest and Food_. With the giving of the child's food the priest is often associated. In the Fiji Islands, at Vitilevu, on the day when the navel-string falls off, a festival is held, and the food of the child is blest by the priest with prayers for his life and prosperity. In Upper Egypt, a feast is held at the house of the father and the child consecrated by the cadi or a priest, to whom is brought a plate with sugar-candy. The priest chews the candy and lets the sweet juice fall out of his mouth into that of the child, and thus "gives him his name out of his mouth" (326. I. 284).