hair, my lyre, my quiver shall have thee always, oh laurel
tree of the Immortals!"

So do we still speak of laurels won, and worn by those of deathless
fame, and still does the first love of Apollo crown the heads of those
whose gifts have fitted them to dwell with the dwellers on Olympus.

"I espouse thee for my tree:
Be thou the prize of honour and renown;
The deathless poet, and the poem, crown;
Thou shalt the Roman festivals adorn,
And, after poets, be by victors worn."

Ovid (_Dryden's translation_).

PSYCHE

Those who read for the first time the story of Psyche must at once be
struck by its kinship to the fairy tales of childhood. Here we have
the three sisters, the two elder jealous and spiteful, the youngest
beautiful and gentle and quite unable to defend herself against her
sisters' wicked arts. Here, too, is the mysterious bridegroom who is
never seen and who is lost to his bride because of her lack of faith.
Truly it is an old, old tale--older than all fairy tales--the story of
love that is not strong enough to believe and to wait, and so to "win
through" in the end--the story of seeds of suspicion sown by one full
of malice in an innocent heart, and which bring to the hapless reaper
a cruel harvest.

Once upon a time, so goes the tale, a king and queen had three
beautiful daughters. The first and the second were fair indeed, but
the beauty of the youngest was such that all the people of the land
worshipped it as a thing sent straight from Olympus. They awaited her
outside the royal palace, and when she came, they threw chaplets of
roses and violets for her little feet to tread upon, and sang hymns of
praise as though she were no mortal maiden but a daughter of the
deathless gods.

There were many who said that the beauty of Aphrodite herself was less
perfect than the beauty of Psyche, and when the goddess found that men
were forsaking her altars in order to worship a mortal maiden, great
was her wrath against them and against the princess who, all
unwittingly, had wrought her this shameful harm.

In her garden, sitting amongst the flowers and idly watching his
mother's fair white doves as they preened their snowy feathers in the
sun, Aphrodite found her son Eros, and angrily poured forth to him the
story of her shame.

"Thine must be the task of avenging thy mother's honour," she said.
"Thou who hast the power of making the loves of men, stab with