achne, and the fair pictures were rent into
motley rags and ribbons. Furiously, too, with her shuttle of boxwood
she smote Arachne. Before her rage, the nymphs fled back to their
golden river and to the vineyards of Tymolus, and the women of
Colophon in blind terror rushed away. And Arachne, shamed to the dust,
knew that life for her was no longer worth possessing. She had
aspired, in the pride of her splendid genius, to a contest with a god,
and knew now that such a contest must ever be vain. A cord hung from
the weaver's beam, and swiftly she seized it, knotted it round her
white neck, and would have hanged herself. But ere the life had passed
out of her, Athene grasped the cord, loosened it, and spoke Arachne's
doom:

"Live!" she said, "O guilty and shameless one! For evermore shalt thou
live and hang as now, thou and thy descendants, that men may never
forget the punishment of the blasphemous one who dared to rival a
god."

Even as she spoke, Arachne's fair form dried up and withered. Her
straight limbs grew grey and crooked and wiry, and her white arms were
no more. And from the beam where the beautiful weaver of Lydia had
been suspended, there hung from a fine grey thread the creature from
which, to this day, there are but few who do not turn with loathing.
Yet still Arachne spins, and still is without a compeer.

"Not anie damzell, which her vaunteth most
In skilfull knitting of soft silken twyne,
Nor anie weaver, which his worke doth boast
In dieper, in damaske, or in lyne,
Nor anie skil'd in workmanship embost,
Nor anie skil'd in loupes of fingring fine,
Might in their divers cunning ever dare
With this so curious networke to compare."

Spenser.

Thus, perhaps, does Arachne have her compensations, and in days that
followed long after the twilight of the gods, did she not gain eternal
honour in the heart of every Scot by the tale of how she saved a
national hero? Kindly, too, are her labours for men as she slays their
mortal enemies, the household flies, and when the peasant--practical,
if not favoured by AEsculapius and Hygeia--runs to raid the loom of
Arachne in order to staunch the quick-flowing blood from the cut hand
of her little child, much more dear to her heart is Arachne the spider
than the unknown Athene.

"Also in spinners be tokens of divination, and of
knowing what weather shall fall--for oft by weathers
that shall fall, some spin or we