as any other speculator."

"Another idol shattered!" I cried, in mock grief. "But Apollo,
Hippopopolis--Apollo! Do not tell me he is not a virtuoso of rare
technique on the lyre!"

"His technique is more than rare," sneered Hippopopolis. "It is
excessively raw. It has been said by men who have heard both that Nero
of Hades can do more to move an audience with his fiddle with two
strings broken and his bow wrist sprained than Apollo can do with the
aid of his lyre and a special dispensation of divine inspiration from
Zeus himself."

"There are various ways of moving audiences, Hippopopolis," I
ventured. "Now Nero, I should say, could move an audience--out of the
hall--in a very few moments. In fact, I have always believed that that
is why he fiddled when Rome was burning: so that people would run out
of the city limits before they perished."

"It's a very droll view," laughed Hippopopolis, "and I dare say holds
much of the truth; but Nero's faulty execution is not proof of
Apollo's virtuosity. For a woodland musicale given by the Dryads, say,
to their friends, the squirrels and moles and wild-cats, and other
denizens of the forest, Apollo will suffice. The musical taste of a
kangaroo might find the strumming of his lyre by Apollo to its liking,
but for cultivated people who know a crescendo andante-arpeggio from
the staccato tones of a penny whistle, he is inadequate."

"You speak as if you had heard the god," said I.

"I have not," retorted Hippopopolis, "but I have heard playing by
people, generally beginners, of whom the rural press has said that
he--or more often she--has the touch of an Apollo, and, if that is
true, as are all things we read in the newspapers, particularly the
rural papers, which are not so sophisticated as to lie, then Apollo
would better not attempt to play at one of our Athenian Courier
Association Smokers. I venture to assert that if he did he would have
to be carried home with a bandage about his brow instead of a laurel,
and his cherished lyre would become but a memory."

I turned sadly to my supper. I had found the mundane things of Greece
disappointing enough, but my sorrow over Hippopopolis's expert
testimony as to the shortcoming of the gods was overwhelming. It was
to be expected that the country would fall into a decadent state
sooner or later, but that the Olympians themselves were not all that
they were cracked up to be by the mythologies had never suggested
itself to me. As