teth still,
Like to a mortal butcher, bent to kill.

* * * * *

Alas, he naught esteems that face of thine,
To which love's eyes pay tributary gazes;
Nor thy soft hands, sweet lips, and crystal eyne,
Whose full perfection all the world amazes;
But having thee at vantage--wondrous dread!--
Would root these beauties as he roots the mead."

Shakespeare.

To all her warnings, Adonis would but give smiles. Ill would it become
him to slink abashed away before the fierceness of an old monster of
the woods, and, laughing in the pride of a whole-hearted boy at a
woman's idle fears, he sped homewards with his hounds.

With the gnawing dread of a mortal woman in her soul, Aphrodite spent
the next hours. Early she sought the forest that she might again plead
with Adonis, and maybe persuade him, for love of her, to give up the
perilous chase because she loved him so.

But even as the rosy gates of the Dawn were opening, Adonis had begun
his hunt, and from afar off the goddess could hear the baying of his
hounds. Yet surely their clamour was not that of hounds in full cry,
nor was it the triumphant noise that they so fiercely make as they
pull down their vanquished quarry, but rather was it baying, mournful
as that of the hounds of Hecate. Swift as a great bird, Aphrodite
reached the spot from whence came the sound that made her tremble.

Amidst the trampled brake, where many a hound lay stiff and dead,
while others, disembowelled by the tusks of the boar, howled aloud in
mortal agony, lay Adonis. As he lay, he "knew the strange, slow chill
which, stealing, tells the young that it is death."

And as, _in extremis_, he thought of past things, manhood came to
Adonis and he knew something of the meaning of the love of
Aphrodite--a love stronger than life, than time, than death itself.
His hounds and his spear seemed but playthings now. Only the
eternities remained--bright Life, and black-robed Death.

Very still he lay, as though he slept; marble-white, and beautiful as
a statue wrought by the hand of a god. But from the cruel wound in the
white thigh, ripped open by the boar's profaning tusk, the red blood
dripped, in rhythmic flow, crimsoning the green moss under him. With a
moan of unutterable anguish, Aphrodite threw herself beside him, and
pillowed his dear head in her tender arms. Then, for a little while,
life's embers flickered up, his cold lips tried to form