"Again I laughed aloud and heartily, and thinking it was now part of the game, I held out both my arms, and protruded my whole body toward the stranger. He would not receive me from my father's neck, but he asked me with benignity and solicitude if I was hungry; at which I laughed again, and more than ever; for it was early in the morning, soon after the first meal, and my father had nourished me most carefully and plentifully in all the days of the famine. But Xanthus, waiting for no answer, took out of a sack, which one of his slaves carried at his side, a cake of wheaten bread and a piece of honeycomb, and gave them to me. I held the honeycomb to my father's mouth, thinking it the most of a dainty. He dashed it to the ground, but seizing the bread he began to devour it ferociously. This also I thought was in the play, and I clapped my hands at his distortions. But Xanthus looked at him like one afraid, and smote the cake from him, crying aloud, 'Name the price,' My father now placed me in his arms, naming a price much below what the other had offered, saying, 'The gods are ever with thee, O Xanthus! therefore to thee do I consign my child.' "But while Xanthus was counting out the silver my father seized the cake again, which the slave had taken up and was about to replace in the wallet. His hunger was exasperated by the taste, and the delay. Suddenly there arose much tumult. Turning round in the old woman's bosom who had received me from Xanthus, I saw my beloved father struggling on the ground, livid and speechless. The more violent my cries, the more rapidly they hurried me away; and many were soon between us. "Little was I suspicious that he had suffered the pangs of famine long before: alas! and he had suffered them for me. Do I weep while I am telling you they ended? I could not have closed his eyes; I was too young; but I might have received his last breath, the only comfort of an orphan's bosom. Do you now think him blameable, O Æsop?" "_Æsop_. It was sublime humanity; it was forbearance and self-denial which even the immortal gods have never shown us." The _Dream of Petrarca_ is, I think, more famous but not more beautiful than this narrative of Rhodope; it lacks the deep human tragedy and infinite charity of the winsome child, and the self-contained father silently perishing of hunger for her; but if the _Æsop and Rhodope_ had never been written, the _Dream of Petrarca_ would secure its author a place among the immortals:-- "... Wearied with the length of my walk over the mountains, and finding a soft molehill, covered with grey moss, by the wayside, I laid my head upon it and slept. I cannot tell how long it was before a species of dream or vision came over me.