s' tails behind them, and who were generally
dancing in a very boisterous manner, with shouts of noisy laughter. When
she stopped to question them, they would only laugh the louder, and make
new merriment out of the lone woman's distress. How unkind of those ugly
satyrs! And once, while crossing a solitary sheep pasture, she saw a
personage named Pan, seated at the foot of a tall rock, and making music
on a shepherd's flute. He, too, had horns, and hairy ears, and goats'
feet; but, being acquainted with Mother Ceres, he answered her question
as civilly as he knew how, and invited her to taste some milk and honey
out of a wooden bowl. But neither could Pan tell her what had become of
Proserpina, any better than the rest of these wild people.

And thus Mother Ceres went wandering about for nine long days and
nights, finding no trace of Proserpina, unless it were now and then a
withered flower; and these she picked up and put in her bosom, because
she fancied that they might have fallen from her poor child's hand. All
day she traveled onward through the hot sun; and, at night again, the
flame of the torch would redden and gleam along the pathway, and she
continued her search by its light, without ever sitting down to rest.

On the tenth day, she chanced to espy the mouth of a cavern within which
(though it was bright noon everywhere else) there would have been only
a dusky twilight; but it so happened that a torch was burning there. It
flickered, and struggled with the duskiness, but could not half light up
the gloomy cavern with all its melancholy glimmer. Ceres was resolved to
leave no spot without a search; so she peeped into the entrance of the
cave, and lighted it up a little more, by holding her own torch before
her. In so doing, she caught a glimpse of what seemed to be a woman,
sitting on the brown leaves of the last autumn, a great heap of which
had been swept into the cave by the wind. This woman (if woman it were)
was by no means so beautiful as many of her sex; for her head, they tell
me, was shaped very much like a dog's, and, by way of ornament, she wore
a wreath of snakes around it. But Mother Ceres, the moment she saw her,
knew that this was an odd kind of a person, who put all her enjoyment
in being miserable, and never would have a word to say to other people,
unless they were as melancholy and wretched as she herself delighted to
be.

"I am wretched enough now," thought poor Ceres, "to talk with this
m