harpies_,
birds of prey of prodigious size and most offensive habits, and fierce
and voracious beyond description. The harpies were celebrated, in
fact, in many of the ancient tales, as a race of beings that infested
certain shores, and often teased and tormented the mariners and
adventurers that happened to come among them. Some said, however, that
there was not a race of such beings, but only two or three in all, and
they gave their names. And yet different narrators gave different
names, among which were Aelopos, Nicothoe, Ocythoe, Ocypoae, Celaeno,
Acholoe, and Aello. Some said that the harpies had the faces and forms
of women. Others described them as frightfully ugly; but all agree in
representing them as voracious beyond description, always greedily
devouring every thing that they could get within reach of their claws.

These fierce monsters flew down upon AEneas and his party, and carried
away the food from off the table before them; and even attacked the
men themselves. The men then armed themselves with swords, secretly,
and waited for the next approach of the harpies, intending to kill
them, when they came near. But the nimble marauders eluded all their
blows, and escaped with their plunder as before. At length the
expedition was driven away from the island altogether, by these
ravenous fowls, and when they were embarking on board of their
vessels, the leader of the harpies perched herself upon a rock
overlooking the scene, and in a human voice loaded AEneas and his
companions, as they went away, with taunts and execrations.

The expedition passed one night in great terror and dread in the
vicinity of Mount Etna, where they had landed. The awful eruptions of
smoke, and flame, and burning lava, which issued at midnight from the
summit of the mountain,--the thundering sounds which they heard
rolling beneath them, through the ground, and the dread which was
inspired in their minds by the terrible monsters that dwelt beneath
the mountains, as they supposed, and fed the fires, all combined to
impress them with a sense of unutterable awe; and as soon as the light
of the morning enabled them to resume their course, they made all
haste to get away from so appalling a scene. At another time they
touched upon a coast which was inhabited by a race of one-eyed
giants,--monsters of enormous magnitude and of remorseless cruelty.
They were cannibals,--feeding on the bodies of men whom they killed by
grasping them in their