The king received him with mockeries. “I will let you stay in Seriphus for a day,” he said, “because I would have you at a marriage feast. I have vowed that Danaë, taken from the temple where she sulks, will be my wife by to-morrow’s sunset.” [Illustration] So Polydectes said, and the lords and princes who were around him mocked at Perseus and flattered the king. Perseus went from them then. The next day he came back to the palace. But in his hands now there was a dread thing—the bag made from the hide of the sea monster that had in it the Gorgon’s head. He saw his mother. She was brought in white and fainting, thinking that she would now have to wed the harsh and overbearing king. Then she saw her son, and hope came into her face. The king seeing Perseus, said: “Step forward, O youngling, and see your mother wed to a mighty man. Step forward to witness a marriage, and then depart, for it is not right that a youth that makes promises and does not keep them should stay in a land that I rule over. Step forward now, you with the empty hands.” But not with empty hands did Perseus step forward. He shouted out: “I have brought something to you at last, O king—a present to you and your mocking friends. But you, O my mother, and you, O my friends, avert your faces from what I have brought.” Saying this Perseus drew out the Gorgon’s head. Holding it by the snaky locks he stood before the company. His mother and his friends averted their faces. But Polydectes and his insolent friends looked full upon what Perseus showed. “This youth would strive to frighten us with some conjuror’s trick,” they said. They said no more, for they became as stones, and as stone images they still stand in that hall in Seriphus. He went to the shepherd’s hut, and he brought Dictys from it with Andromeda. Dictys he made king in Polydectes’s stead. Then with Danaë and Andromeda, his mother and his wife, he went from Seriphus. He did not go to Argos, the country that his grandfather had ruled over, although the people there wanted Perseus to come to them, and be king over them. He took the kingdom of Tiryns in exchange for that of Argos, and there he lived with Andromeda, his lovely wife out of Ethopia. They had a son named Perses who became the parent of the Persian people. The sickle-sword that had slain the Gorgon went back to Hermes, and Hermes took Medusa’s head also. That head Hermes’s divine sister set upon her shield—Medusa’s head upon the shield of Pallas Athene. O may Pallas Athene guard us all, and bring us out of this land of sands and stone where are the deadly serpents that have come from the drops of blood that fell from the Gorgon’s head!