"Yes, do!" begged all the children, crowding round Mr. Stacey. "We want to hear your English story!" "It's not an English one, but a very old Greek one. Shall we rest on this wall while I tell it? Luigia shall come on my knee. Yes, there's room for Pepino too, and Gaspare and Vincent may sit next to me. Well, in the old Golden Age, when the world was young, Ceres, the Goddess of the Harvest, who gave all the fruits of earth to men, had a beautiful daughter named Proserpine, or, as the Greeks called her, Persephone. She made Sicily her place of residence, and she and her nymphs used to delight themselves with its flowery meadows and limpid streams, and beautiful views. One day she and her companions were wandering in the plain of Enna, gathering flowers, when there suddenly appeared the god Pluto, king of Hades, the regions of the dead. Falling in love with beautiful Proserpine, he seized her, and forced her to get into his chariot. She screamed to her maidens, but they could not help her, and Pluto carried her off. With his trident he struck a hole in the ground, so that chariot and horses fell through into Hades, of which place Proserpine became the queen. Now Ceres did not know what had happened to her daughter, and she wandered all over the earth seeking for her. At last she found Proserpine's girdle on the surface of the waters of a fountain where Pluto had struck his hole in the ground, and the nymph Arethusa told her how her daughter had been stolen away. Full of indignation, Ceres went to complain to Jupiter, who promised that Proserpine should be restored if she had taken nothing to eat in the realm of Hades. Unfortunately Proserpine, as she walked in the Elysian fields, had gathered and eaten a pomegranate, which act constituted her a subject of those regions. To pacify Ceres, Jupiter permitted that Proserpine should spend six months of every year with Pluto in Hades, and the other six months with her mother on earth. Each spring Ceres went to the entrance of a great gloomy grotto to meet her daughter, and with her return all the flowers bloomed on earth again. There is a very celebrated picture by Sir Frederick Leighton, called 'The Return of Persephone.' The artist has painted Ceres at the entrance of the grotto with the sunshine behind her, holding out her arms to the lovely daughter whom the god Mercury is bringing back to her out of the darkness.