ing life. No more altars of meadow turf for them,
no more wreaths of flowers, no more offerings of milk and wheat and
honey. Only now and then at long intervals some goat-herd would
furtively lay a tiny cheese on the threshold of the sacred grot, whose
entrance was almost blocked now with thorns and brambles. But it was
merely the rabbits and squirrels came to eat these poor dainties. The
Nymphs were dwellers in distant forests and gloomy caves, driven forth
of their old homes by the apostles from the East. And to hinder their
ever returning more, the priests of the Galilean God poured over trees
and stones a charmed water, and pronounced magic words, and set up
crosses where roads met in the forest; for the Galilean, my son, is
learned in the art of incantations. Better than Saturn, better than
Jupiter, he knows the virtue of formularies and mystic signs. Thus the
poor rustic Divinities could no more find refuge in their sacred woods.
The company of long-haired, goat-footed Satyrs, that beat of yore their
mother earth with sounding hoof, was but a cloud of pale, dumb shadows
trailing along the mountain-side like the morning mist the Sun melts and
dispels.

"Buffeted, as by a fierce wind, by the wrath of Heaven, their spectral
forms would be whirled eddying all day long in the dust of the roads.
The night on the contrary was somewhat less hostile to them. Night is
not wholly the Galilean God's; He shares its dominion with the devils.
As the shades of night descended from the hills, Fauns and Faun-women,
Nymphs and Pans, came huddling beneath the shelter of the tombs along
the roadside, and there under the kindly empire of the infernal powers
would enjoy a brief repose. Of all the tombs they liked mine the best,
as that of a reverend ancestor of their own. Soon all assembled under
that part of the cornice which, giving South, was quite free of moss
and always dry. Thither the airy folk came flying every evening as
surely as doves to the dovecote. They easily found room, grown tiny now
and light as the chaff that scuds before the winnowing-fan. For my own
part, sallying out from my quiet death-chamber, I would sit down
sometimes in the midst of them under shelter of the marble edge-tiles,
and in a feeble, whistling voice sing them songs of the days of Saturn
and Jupiter; then they would remember the happy times gone by for ever.
Under the eyes of Diana, they would join to make a show of their ancient
pastimes, and the bel