Behold the sun-god starting on his daily round! Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn, precedes him scattering flowers, the lovely colors of the morning sky. The other figures are the early hours. The Greek poets used to play with these myth stories a good deal, changing them to suit their poetic fancy. Theocritus, for example, in a beautiful fragment that has come down to us, paints this picture of the breaking day: "Dawn, up from the sea to the sky, By her fleet-footed steeds was drawn." You see, according to this poet's conception, Miss Dawn had a chariot of her own. ] But nothing serious happened until one time Phaeton persuaded father to let him drive the sun chariot for a day. The horses, feeling at once a new and weak hand on the reins, tore out of the regular road and went dashing right and left. They even got so near the North Pole that the ice began to melt. They fairly flew down toward the earth, set the mountains smoking, and dried up all the springs and most of the rivers. THEN THINGS BEGAN TO HAPPEN They dried up a certain great lake, so that there is to this day the Libyan Desert in Africa, where this lake used to be. They made the very sea shrink so that there were "wide naked plains where once its billows rose." Finally Mother Earth called on Jupiter Pluvius, as god of thunder, rain, and storms, to stop Phaeton and the runaways and put out the fire. Struck by a bolt of lightning poor Phaeton fell headlong from the skies, and a world-wide rain put out the world-wide fire. [Illustration: _From a cameo by Da Vinci_ THE FALL OF PHAETON (Museum, Florence) ] Now, would you believe it, this queer old Old World story may really be true in its way. Of course there never was a sun god and no spoiled boy who did just that thing; although many spoiled boys have _tried_ to set the world on fire and failed because they thought it would be so easy. But the earth really has been on fire in a sense; that is, has melted from the heat. And in parts where you would least suspect--the rocks. There's where I got into it. And some of these rocks, not more than ten miles[3] from where you live, are either still molten, or continue to melt from time to time; as you can see when lava comes pouring from volcanoes, such as those of Hawaii. [Footnote 3: Straight down, of course.]