“I have come here,” said the youth, and he took the bronze shield upon his knees and began to polish it, “I have come here because I want you, the nymphs who guard them, to give to me the cap of darkness and the shoes of flight and the magic pouch. I must gain these things; without them I must go to my death. Why I must gain them you will know from my story.” When he said that he had come for the three magic treasures that they guarded, the kind nymph was more startled than she and her sisters had been startled by the appearance of the strange youth in their hidden valley. She turned away from him. But she looked again and she saw that he was beautiful and brave looking. He had spoken of his death. The nymph stood looking at him pitifully, and the youth, with the bronze shield laid beside his knees and the strange hooked sword lying across it, told her his story. “I am Perseus,” he said, “and my grandfather, men say, is king in Argos. His name is Acrisius. Before I was born a prophecy was made to him that the son of Danaë, his daughter, would slay him. Acrisius was frightened by the prophecy, and when I was born he put my mother and myself into a chest, and he sent us adrift upon the waves of the sea. “I did not know what a terrible peril I was in, for I was an infant newly born. My mother was so hopeless that she came near to death. But the wind and the waves did not destroy us: they brought us to a shore; a shepherd found the chest, and he opened it and brought my mother and myself out of it alive. The land we had come to was Seriphus. The shepherd who found the chest and who rescued my mother and myself was the brother of the king. His name was Dictys. “In the shepherd’s wattled house my mother stayed with me, a little infant, and in that house I grew from babyhood to childhood, and from childhood to boyhood. He was a kind man, this shepherd Dictys. His brother Polydectes had put him away from the palace, but Dictys did not grieve for that, for he was happy minding his sheep upon the hillside, and he was happy in his little hut of wattles and clay. “Polydectes, the king, was seldom spoken to about his brother, and it was years before he knew of the mother and child who had been brought to live in Dictys’s hut. But at last he heard of us, for strange things began to be said about my mother—how she was beautiful, and how she looked like one who had been favored by the gods. Then one day when he was hunting, Polydectes the king came to the hut of Dictys the shepherd. “He saw Danaë, my mother, there. By her looks he knew that she was a king’s daughter and one who had been favored by the gods. He wanted her for his wife. But my mother hated this harsh and overbearing king, and she would not wed with him. Often he came storming around the shepherd’s hut, and at last my mother had to take refuge from him in a temple. There she became the priestess of the goddess.