So Erisichthon lay down on his couch and was soon fast asleep. Then Famine sped in through the window and hovered over where he lay. She folded her wings around him and breathed her poison into his veins. Then she hastened back to Scythia, for she had no other errand in a land of plenty. Erisichthon did not wake but he stirred in his sleep and moved his jaws as if he were eating, for he was very hungry in his dreams. In the morning he woke with a raging hunger that was a hundred times worse than that of the day before. He sold his load of wood and spent all the money for whatever food the earth, the air, and the sea produced. He consumed vast quantities of fish, fowl, the flesh of lambs, fruit and vegetables; but the more Erisichthon ate, the greater was his hunger. The amount of food that would have been enough for the whole of Athens was not sufficient for this man. He continually craved more. Erisichthon sold the wood of the entire oak tree, and began selling pieces of the land that made his farm in order to get food for appeasing his terrible hunger. At last his fields were gone and he had to sell his furniture, his tools, his books, and all his vases. Still he could not get food enough to appease his gnawing appetite, so he sold his house and lived in a tent that he set up beside the road. But his hunger was still unsatisfied and in his madness Erisichthon sold his only daughter to be the slave of a fisherman who cast his nets beside the Aegean Sea. The girl loved her father very dearly and her grief, as she gathered sea weed along the shore for her master, touched the heart of Neptune, the god of the sea. He changed her to the form of a horse, and she went home to Erisichthon, hoping that he would look upon so fine an animal with favor, and give it a home. But her father sold the horse to a chariot racer. She escaped and went again to the shore where Neptune changed her, in turn, to a stag, an ox, and a rare bird. Each time she made her way home, and each time her father sold her to buy food. So the bird flew away to Mount Olympus and was never seen again. At last there came a day when Erisichthon could feed himself no longer. There was nothing left to him in the world that he could sell, and his hunger was so great that he went, like a raving beast, up and down the bountiful fields of Ceres demanding that food be given him. But those whom Famine touches because they break Ceres' laws, and destroy life and property find no help unless they try to restore the order that they have hurt. Erisichthon was too weak to work, and he could never raise another oak tree like that one which had been growing for centuries. So he went, at last, to live with Famine in Scythia which was a long way from the Mount of the gods. THE BEE MAN OF ARCADIA.