Melampos had only a slit in the wall for a window, and he never saw his captors save when they tossed him some dried crusts once a day. He could hear them, though, counting their stolen coin and rattling it about. Then he heard the sound of clinking armor and the occasional clashing of swords. "They are planning to kill me," he thought. He looked longingly at the narrow chink in his prison wall, hardly large enough to let a sunbeam through. "If I could but beckon to a wood pigeon and tell it my plight, I should be able to send a message to my friends by it," he sighed, "or I could ask the woodpecker who can bore through wood to try and widen my window so that I might escape." Just then Melampos heard a rustling sound in the heavy beam of the ceiling of the room where he was imprisoned and then a small voice spoke to him. "We could teach you better than any other creatures how to escape," it said. "For years this forest has belonged to us, small as we are, and in a very short time now it will return to the earth from which the trees that built it came." Melampos was amazed. He looked in all the corners of the room but could see no one. Then the voice went on. "No wood, or men who live in shelters made of wood are safe from us. We have bored the beams and timbers of this fortress in a thousand places until they are hollow and ready to fall." Suddenly Melampos discovered the source of the voice. Through a knothole in a beam above his head a wood worm peered down at him. With its companions it had eaten the planks that made the fortress until it was no safer than a house of paper. "We are all doomed," Melampos told one of the robbers who brought him his food that night. "Doomed; what do you mean by that?" the robber asked in terror, for like most of his kind he was nothing but a coward at heart. Melampos showed him the decayed wood, hollow, and riddled with holes, and the man called his companions to see their danger. They decided that they must flee from the fortress at once, and they decided to give Melampos his freedom. It would not have been safe to stay in the fortress another season, for almost as soon as the winter storms came it crumbled like a house of sand, and the ants and the crickets used it to make themselves winter shelters. Melampos went back to his farm and the pleasant conversation of the insects, the birds, and his four-footed friends. He was the first mortal to have such friends, but there were others who followed him and found happiness, also, through being kind to little wild creatures. HOW A HUNTRESS BECAME A BEAR. Although Juno was the queen of the gods she had a failing that is common to mortals. She was very jealous, and particularly of any maiden of Earth whom she fancied might sometime be given a place by Jupiter among the great family of the gods on Mount Olympus. As soon as Juno saw Callisto, a beautiful huntress of the forests of Arcadia, she disliked her.