The very origins and traditions of the trade of music seem to enforce a certain versatility of emotion and experience. Apollo, the particular god of music, was not much of a lover, and what few affairs he had were hardly happy; his suit was either declined with thanks, or, if accepted, ended in the death of the lady; as for himself--being a god, he was denied the comfortable convenience of suicide. Daphne, as every one knows, took to a tree to escape his attentions; and Coronis, as so many another woman, was soon blasé of divine courtship, and, for variety, turned her eyes elsewhere. She was punished with death indeed; but her son was Aesculapius. Which explains the medicinal value music has always claimed. Old Boetius--who had affection enough for both a first and a second wife--tells, in his treatise on music, many anecdotes of the art's influence, not only upon sickness but upon wrathful mobs bent on mischief. He quotes Plato's statement that "the greatest caution is to be taken not to suffer any change in well-moraled music, there being no corruption of manners in a republic so great as that which follows a gradual declination from a prudent and modest music; for whatever corruptions are made in music, the minds of the hearers will immediately suffer the same, it being certain that there is no way to the affections more open than that of hearing." The musician proverbially both plays upon and is a lyre. This instrument, as is well known, was first made out of a vacant turtle-shell, by Mercury, the god of gymnastic exercises and of theft, that is to say, of technic, and of plagiarism. Mercury was nimble with his affections also; among his progeny was the great god Pan, who is frequently reported, and commonly believed, to be dead. Pan was so far from beautiful that even his nurse could not find a compliment for him, and in fact dropped him and ran. Considering what one usually expects of a new-born infant, Pan must have been really unattractive. His lack of personal charm was the origin of the invention of Pan's pipes or syrinx. Miss Syrinx of the Naiad family--one of the first families of Arcadia--was so horrified when Pan proposed to her, that she fled. He pursued and she begged aid of certain nymphs who lived in a houseboat on the river Ladon. When Pan thought to seize her, he found his arms filled with reeds. How many a lover has pursued thus ardently some charmer, only to find that when he has her, he has but a broken reed! But Pan, noting that the wind was sighing musically about the reeds, cut seven of them with a knife and bound them together as a pastoral pipe. A wise fellow he, and could profit even from a jilt.