ink, for he had bolted the larger part of an
excellent cheese. Not far from the roots of the plane-tree a gentle
stream flowed slowly along, like a placid lake, rivaling silver
or crystal.

"Look," said I: "drink your fill of the water of this stream, bright as
the Milky Way."

He arose, and, wrapping himself in his cloak, with his knees doubled
under him, knelt down upon the shelving bank and bent greedily toward
the water. Scarcely had he touched its surface with his lips, when the
wound in his throat burst open and the sponge rolled out, a few drops of
blood with it; and his lifeless body would have fallen into the river
had I not laid hold of one of his feet, and dragged him with great
difficulty and labor to the top of the bank. There, having mourned my
hapless comrade as much as there was time, I buried him in the sandy
soil that bordered the stream. Then, trembling and terror-stricken, I
fled through various unfrequented places; and as though guilty of
homicide, abandoned my country and my home, embraced a voluntary exile,
and now dwell in AEtolia, where I have married another wife.

Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature.'

THE AWAKENING OF CUPID

[The radical difference in the constituent parts of the
'Golden Ass' is startling, and is well illustrated by the
selection given previously and that which follows. The story
of the "drummer" comports exactly with the modern idea of
realism in fiction: a vivid and unflinching picture of
manners and morals, full of broad coarse humor and worldly
wit. The story of Cupid and Psyche is the purest, daintiest,
most poetic of fancies; in essence a fairy tale that might be
told of an evening by the fire-light in the second century or
the nineteenth, but embodying also a high and beautiful
allegory, and treated with a delicate art which is in extreme
contrast with the body of the 'Golden Ass.' The difference is
almost as striking as between Gray's lampoon on "Jemmy
Twitcher" and his 'Bard' or 'Elegy'; or between
Aristophanes's revels in filth and his ecstatic soarings into
the heavenliest regions of poetry.

The contrast is even more rasping when we remember that the
tale is not put into the mouth of a girl gazing dreamily into
the glowing coals on the hearth, or of some elegant reciter
amusing a social group in a Roman drawing-room or garden,
bu