n's music is
sweeter and truer and greater than the music of Apollo. Pan is the
victor, and I, King Midas, give him the victor's crown!"

With scorn ineffable the sun-god turned upon Midas, his peasant's face
transfigured by his proud decision. For a little he gazed at him in
silence, and his look might have turned a sunbeam to an icicle.

Then he spoke:

"The ears of an ass have heard my music," he said. "Henceforth shall
Midas have ass's ears."

And when Midas, in terror, clapped his hands to his crisp black hair,
he found growing far beyond it, the long, pointed ears of an ass.
Perhaps what hurt him most, as he fled away, was the shout of
merriment that came from Pan. And fauns and nymphs and satyrs echoed
that shout most joyously.

Willingly would he have hidden in the woods, but there he found no
hiding-place. The trees and shrubs and flowering things seemed to
shake in cruel mockery. Back to his court he went and sent for the
court hairdresser, that he might bribe him to devise a covering for
these long, peaked, hairy symbols of his folly. Gladly the hairdresser
accepted many and many oboli, many and many golden gifts, and all
Phrygia wondered, while it copied, the strange headdress of the king.

But although much gold had bought his silence, the court barber was
unquiet of heart. All day and all through the night he was tormented
by his weighty secret. And then, at length, silence was to him a
torture too great to be borne; he sought a lonely place, there dug a
deep hole, and, kneeling by it, softly whispered to the damp earth:
"King Midas has ass's ears."

Greatly relieved, he hastened home, and was well content until, on the
spot where his secret lay buried, rushes grew up. And when the winds
blew through them, the rushes whispered for all those who passed by to
hear: "King Midas has ass's ears! King Midas has ass's ears!" Those
who listen very carefully to what the green rushes in marshy places
whisper as the wind passes through them, may hear the same thing to
this day. And those who hear the whisper of the rushes may, perhaps,
give a pitying thought to Midas--the tragic comedian of mythology.

CEYX AND HALCYONE

"St. Martin's summer, halcyon days."

_King Henry VI_, i. 2, 131.

"Halcyon days"--how often is the expression made use of, how seldom do
its users realise from whence they have borrowed it.

"These were halcyon days," says the old man, and his memory wanders
back