g for the voyage, an unforeseen difficulty
threatened to end it before it was begun. The vessel, you must
understand, was so long, and broad, and ponderous, that the united force
of all the fifty was insufficient to shove her into the water. Hercules,
I suppose, had not grown to his full strength, else he might have set
her afloat as easily as a little boy launches his boat upon a puddle.
But here were these fifty heroes, pushing, and straining, and growing
red in the face, without making the Argo start an inch. At last,
quite wearied out, they sat themselves down on the shore exceedingly
disconsolate, and thinking that the vessel must be left to rot and fall
in pieces, and that they must either swim across the sea or lose the
Golden Fleece.

All at once, Jason bethought himself of the galley's miraculous
figure-head.

"O, daughter of the Talking Oak," cried he, "how shall we set to work to
get our vessel into the water?"

"Seat yourselves," answered the image (for it had known what had ought
to be done from the very first, and was only waiting for the question to
be put),--"seat yourselves, and handle your oars, and let Orpheus play
upon his harp."

Immediately the fifty heroes got on board, and seizing their oars, held
them perpendicularly in the air, while Orpheus (who liked such a task
far better than rowing) swept his fingers across the harp. At the first
ringing note of the music, they felt the vessel stir. Orpheus thrummed
away briskly, and the galley slid at once into the sea, dipping her prow
so deeply that the figure-head drank the wave with its marvelous lips,
and rising again as buoyant as a swan. The rowers plied their fifty
oars; the white foam boiled up before the prow; the water gurgled and
bubbled in their wake; while Orpheus continued to play so lively a
strain of music, that the vessel seemed to dance over the billows by way
of keeping time to it. Thus triumphantly did the Argo sail out of the
harbor, amidst the huzzas and good wishes of everybody except the wicked
old Pelias, who stood on a promontory, scowling at her, and wishing
that he could blow out of his lungs the tempest of wrath that was in his
heart, and so sink the galley with all on board. When they had sailed
above fifty miles over the sea, Lynceus happened to cast his sharp eyes
behind, and said that there was this bad-hearted king, still perched
upon the promontory, and scowling so gloomily that it looked like a
black thunder-cloud