rs preferred to write their chronicles upon pots, urns and
tombs or to scrawl placid monosyllables upon polygonal walls. But with
all their industry the muses have never been able to keep pace with the
material that has accumulated round the dwellings of men and women. They
have done their best and, when their mother Mnemosyne began to fail and
the business was split up first into three, then four, seven, eight, and
ultimately into nine departments, it was hoped that a better result would
be shown; but they have never had an adequate allowance, and have always
been in financial difficulties, besides which they have disagreed among
themselves, and quarrelling wastes time.

Clio in her matter-of-fact way built a storehouse wherein to preserve her
treasures; her curious, imaginative sisters peeped through the key-hole.

"Dear me!" they said to one another. "What a collection! Do you think
we could get inside and see it properly?"

They waited till Clio went one day with Neptune to pay a visit to the
Ethiopians "who lie in two halves, one half looking on to the Atlantic
and the other on to the Indian Ocean," they induced Vulcan to come and
pick the lock for them and soon they were roaming all over the palace.

"How admirably arranged!" exclaimed one of them.

"It must be nearly exhaustive!" said another.

"Observe the collateral placing of remarkable persons and events," said a
third.

"One could find almost anything one wanted," said a fourth.

"Ah!" they exclaimed; "oh! now if only we could manage to get a little
life into some of these dead bones, how pleased Clio would be!"

They rifled the show-cases and carried off the most attractive details,
each taking whatever pleased her best. They stole from Clio her
transient facts and made them live again as their own by breathing into
them the spirit of eternal truth and re-stating them in folk-lore, in
tradition, in verse, in romance, in melody, in superstition, in outline,
in colour, in modelling, in the movements of the dance; they set them up
in libraries, in concert-rooms, in picture-galleries, in theatres, in
churches, in corridors of sculpture, in the hearts of the people. This
was not what Clio had intended; she was not at all pleased; she
complained that her sisters had meddled, they had robbed her of her chief
possessions and left the remainder in disorder; her collection no longer
corresponded with the catalogue. In attempting to reconstruct she
flo