The temple of Ceres, or Demeter, meaning "Mother Earth" (that is, not the whole solid earth, but the portion that produces vegetation), stands in the sacred city of Eleusis, on the Thracian plain, and all men who earn their living by the soil come here to do her honor. This temple was built on the spot where the Goddess met Triptolemus and taught him the use of grains, also how to plow, sow the seeds and gather the crops after they had ripened. Triptolemus then went forth and taught the nations of the world. One day while Ceres was watching the harvests, Proserpine, her lovely daughter, disappeared. "While like a child with busy speed and care She gathers lilies here, and vi'lets there; While first to fill her little lap she strives, Hell's grizzly monarch at the shade arrives. See's her thus sporting on the flow'ry green And loves the blooming maid as soon as seen." "Swift as a thought he seized the beauteous prey And bore her in his sooty car away." --_Ovid's Metamorphoses_ (MAYNWARING'S Trans.) Pluto, it seems, had come above the ground to survey the surface of the Sicilian land, for the roof of his kingdom had been considerably shaken on account of the struggles of the giant Typhon confined beneath the roots of Mount Etna. Poets claim that no sooner had the Underground God appeared than Cupid, the mischievous son of Venus, pulled a gold-tipped arrow from his sheath, and laughing gleefully, shot the gloomy monarch in the heart. Ceres, in the meantime, nearly frantic with grief, searched over land and sea for her lost daughter, and when night fell, so that her search might not be hindered, she tore up young pine trees by the roots and dipped them in the fires of Mount Etna. She could not eat, saying (as Tennyson puts it) that the "nectar smack'd of hemlock" and the "rich ambrosia tasted aconite," while ancient poets claim that neither Aurora, the Dawn, nor Hesperus, the Evening Star, ever saw her rest. Yet unweakened by fatigue and lack of sustenance, the goddess turned to the earth and forbade it to bear until Proserpine was returned to her.