The Children's Hour Volume Iii Part 1

The Children's Hour.

Volume 3.

Edited by Eva March Tappan.

TO THE CHILDREN

The greater part of this book is made up of stories from the poems of Homer and Virgil. Homer is thought to have lived in Greece about three thousand years ago, and yet his poems never seem old-fashioned and people do not tire of reading them. Boys and girls almost always like them, because they are so full of stories. If you want to read about giants or mermaids or shipwrecks or athletic contests or enchanters or furious battles or the capture of cities or voyages to strange countries, all you have to do is to open the Iliad and the Odyssey, and you will find stories on all of these subjects. Homer can describe a foot-race or the throwing of a discus so that you hold your breath to see who will win; and he can picture a battle so vividly that you almost try to dodge the arrows and spears. He can make the tears come into your eyes by telling you of the grief of the warrior's wife when he leaves her and their baby son to go to battle; and he can almost make you shout, "Hurrah for the brave champion!"

when he tells you what wonderful deeds of prowess have been done. He can describe a shield so minutely that you could make one like it; and he can paint a scene of feasting so perfectly that you feel as if you had been in the very room.

How is it that Homer makes his stories seem so real? There are several reasons, but one of the strongest is because he tells the little things that writers often forget to put in. When he describes the welcome given to two strangers at the house of the lost Ulysses, by Telemachus, son of the wanderer, he begins, "When they were come within the lofty hall, he carried the spear to a tall pillar and set it in a well-worn rack." That one word, "well-worn," gives us the feeling that Homer is not making up a story, but that he has really seen the rack and noticed how it looked. The same sentence shows why it is that people do not tire of reading Homer. It ends, "where also stood many a spear of hardy Ulysses." This reminds the reader that in spite of the hero's long years of absence, no one has been allowed to remove his weapons from their old place. From this one phrase, then, we can realize how much his wife and son love him, and how they have mourned for him. Telemachus welcomes the strangers, but we can feel how eager he is for them to be made comfortable as soon as possible so he can talk of his father and learn whether they have chanced to meet him in their wanderings. Homer's poems are full of such sentences as these; and, no matter how many times one reads them, some thought, unnoticed before, is ever coming to light. That is why they are always fresh and new and interesting.

There is a tradition that Homer was blind, and that he wandered about from one place to another, singing or reciting his poems; but this is only tradition, and there is little hope that we shall ever be able to find out whether it is true or not.

Homer's great poem, the Iliad, is the account of the Trojan War. His Odyssey relates the adventures of the hero Ulysses, or Odysseus, as the Greeks called him, in many years of wandering at the close of the war before his enemies among the G.o.ds would permit him to return to his home.

There were Trojan heroes, however, as well as Greek, and aeneas was one of them. Virgil, the Latin poet, has told in the aeneid the story of his troubles and adventures. aeneas, too, was driven over the waters, for the G.o.ds had told him it was the will of Jupiter, or Zeus, as it is in Greek, for him to seek Italy and there found a city. Part of his journey is the same as that of Ulysses. He, too, stops at the country of the one-eyed giants and has to row as fast as he can to escape the rocks that they throw at his vessel. He, too, hears the thunders of Mount aetna and sees the flashing of the fires of the volcano. His sailors point to it in fear and whisper to one another, "That is the giant Enceladus. He rebelled against the G.o.ds and they piled the mountain on top of him. The fires of Jupiter burn him, and he breathes out glowing flames. When he tosses from one side to the other, the whole island of Sicily is shaken with a mighty earthquake."

Virgil was no homeless singer; he was one of the great literary men of Rome, and he read his poems aloud to the Emperor Augustus. He had a handsome villa and a troop of friends. He enjoyed everything that was beautiful and seemed as happy when a friend had written a good poem as if he had composed it himself. He was never satisfied with his verse till he had made every line as perfect as possible. When he was ill and knew that he could not recover, he made a will, and in it he ordered the aeneid to be burned, because it was not so polished as he wished. "I meant to spend three years more on it," he said. Fortunately for all the people who enjoy a great poem, the Emperor forbade that this part of the will should be carried out. He gave the ma.n.u.script to three friends of Virgil, all of them poets, with orders to strike out every phrase that they believed Virgil would have struck out on revision, but not to add one word. This is the way that the aeneid was saved for us. If it had been destroyed, we should have lost the work of one of the best storytellers that have ever lived.

Livy, too, was a friend of the Emperor Augustus, He lived in Rome, enjoying his companions, the libraries of the city, and, most of all, his independence. Even Virgil was ready to insert a few lines here and there in a poem to gratify his friends, or to choose a subject that he knew would please the Emperor; but Livy wrote on the subject that pleased him and treated it just as he believed to be best. His great work was his history, and this he begins with a little preface, as independent as it is graceful. "Whether I shall gain any share of glory," he says, "by writing a history of the Roman people, I do not know. The work, however, will be a pleasure to me; and even if any fame that might otherwise be mine should be hidden by the success of other writers, I shall console myself by thinking of their excellence and greatness." No such thing happened, however, for the kindly historian was so praised and his work so fully appreciated that he said he had all the fame he could wish.

Herodotus was a Greek who liked to travel. The world was very small in his day, for little of it was known except some of the lands bordering on the Mediterranean. To visit Tyre, Babylon, Egypt, Palestine, and the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, as he did, made a man a great traveler five centuries before Christ. Herodotus enjoyed all these wanderings, but they also "meant business" to him. Whenever he came to a place of historical interest, he stayed awhile. He explored the country thereabouts, he measured the important buildings, he talked with the people who knew most about the place. Then, when he came to write of its history, he did not write like a man who had read an article or two in an encyclopaedia and was trying to recite what he had learned, but like one who knew the place which he was describing and liked to talk about it, and about what had happened there. It is no wonder that his history has always been a favorite; and to be a favorite author for twenty centuries is no small glory.

Ovid was a Latin poet who knew how to tell a story. He could not only invent a tale, but he could tell it so well that the reader feels as if it must be true. His most interesting stories, however, he did not invent, for they are a rewriting of the old mythological tales. In one respect he is like Homer; he never forgets the little things, and he tells so many details that we can hardly believe he is imagining them. In his story of Baucis and Philemon, for instance, Ovid does not forget to say that the cottage door was so low that the two G.o.ds had to stoop to pa.s.s through it; that Baucis hurried to brighten the fire with dry leaves and bits of bark; that one leg of the table was too short and had to be propped up with a piece of tile. He tells us that the kindhearted couple tried to catch their one goose so as to cook it for the supper of their guests; but that they were so old, and the goose so nimble of wing, that he escaped them and flew to the G.o.ds for refuge. We are so accustomed to think of Latin as a grave, dignified language that almost every line of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" is a pleasant surprise. The stories that he tells, "The Miraculous Pitcher", "The Golden Touch", "The Pomegranate Seeds", and others, retold by Hawthorne, are favorites among the boys and girls of to-day, and they must have been liked just as well by the Roman children.

In Rome the children read the great poets in school, and I fancy that they were always glad when the hour came to read the "Metamorphoses."

STORIES FROM HERODOTUS

LADRONIUS, THE PRINCE OF THIEVES

Retold by G. H. Boden and W. Barrington d'Almeida

Many hundreds of years ago, not long after the Greeks returned from the famous siege of Troy, there lived a king of Egypt, whose name was Rhampsinitus. So great a king was he, that he kept a small army constantly employed in supplying the royal household with food, and another small army was required to keep the gardens of the palace in order. And had any one been bold enough to doubt the greatness of the king, he need only have looked at his magnificent dress to set all doubts at rest forever. Upon the neck of the king was a heavy necklace, glittering with priceless jewels, and on his arms were ma.s.sive bracelets of pure gold. A golden serpent, the symbol of royalty, gleamed from his forehead, and his golden breastplate showed the sacred beetle worked in precious stones, to protect him from evil spirits. Whenever he appeared in the streets of his capital, he was borne in the royal chair on the shoulders of eight of his courtiers, while on each side walked a great n.o.ble carrying a fan, shaped like a palm leaf, with a long, straight stem. In front marched the bodyguard of Sardinians, men with fair skins and blue eyes, who looked very much out of place among the swarthy Egyptians; and last of all came the grim, black guards from Ethiopia, with their sabres flashing in the sun. And all the people fell on their faces and kissed the dust before their royal master. Moreover, King Rhampsinitus erected several enormous statues of himself, as well as many fine palaces and a beautiful temple, bearing inscriptions which related all his great and glorious deeds, so that the people who lived after him might know how great a king he had been.

But, in spite of all his greatness, there was one thing that prevented King Rhampsinitus from being a happy man. He had so many treasures--ma.s.ses of silver, nuggets of gold, and bags of gold-dust, jewelry, precious stones, and carvings in ivory--that he lived in constant fear of being robbed. He had all his treasures packed in large jars and strong chests, which were securely fastened, sealed up, and stowed away in a strong room of the palace; but even then he did not feel comfortable, for might not the palace be broken into by a clever thief and part of his treasure stolen, while he slept? Besides, there was so much treasure packed away already, that it was difficult to find a safe place for any more. His anxiety made the king so unhappy, and caused him so many sleepless nights, that he determined at last to build a large chamber of stone, with walls too thick for any thief to break through. He sent for his chief architect, who collected a great mult.i.tude of workmen and set to work building the chamber without delay. Whole villages were compelled to join in the work; even the old men and children were employed in carrying away rubbish, bringing water and clay, and doing other work that was not too hard for them. The stronger and more skillful workmen hewed great blocks of granite, which were dragged to the place on wooden sledges; and, as they had no cranes to lift the stones into their places on the walls, they were obliged to build mounds of sand and rough bricks, and roll up each stone gradually with wooden levers, until they got it into its proper place. It was terribly hard work, but there were so many workmen, and the foremen used their whips so unmercifully, that the walls rose very rapidly.

Now the architect was a cunning man, and guessed what the chamber was intended to hold. He therefore fitted one stone in such a way that it would slide down and leave a hole just large enough for a man to crawl through; and yet, when you looked at the wall, there was no sign at all by which the secret could be discovered. Nor did the architect think it necessary to mention the secret opening to his majesty, when he showed the chamber to him and told him that it was as strong as he could make it.

Rhampsinitus lost no time in moving his treasures into the new treasure-chamber. The key he kept with him night and day, so that at last he could sleep peacefully, knowing that any one who wished to pa.s.s the solid, bra.s.s-bound door, must first prevail upon him to unlock it.

For some time all went well. The king went to the treasury every morning, and found everything in its place. Evidently he had been too clever for the thieves.

In the mean time the architect was lying ill in bed, and day by day he grew weaker and weaker; until at length he knew that his end was approaching, and, calling his two sons to his bedside, he told them of the secret way into the treasure-chamber.

"I have little of my own to leave you, my sons," he said, "and I have but little influence at court; but by the aid of this secret, which I devised for your sake, you may become rich men, and hold the office of king's treasurers for life."

The young men were delighted at his words, and so impatient were they to enjoy their good fortune, that on the very night of their father's funeral they stole away quietly to the place where the treasure-house stood. They found the sliding stone exactly as their father had described it. The younger and slimmer of the two brothers crawled through the opening and found himself in a dark chamber, surrounded by heavy chests and jars with sealed covers. Breaking open one of the latter, he put in his hand and drew out a handful of gold, which sparkled and twinkled at him even in the faint light which came through the hole in the wall. Handful after handful he drew out and pa.s.sed to his brother, at the same time filling the bags he had brought with him, until both had as much as they could conveniently carry. Then they replaced the stone, and returned to lay the treasure before their mother; for in those days stealing was considered rather a clever trick, and even the thief's mother did not scold him, so long as he was not so clumsy as to be caught.

Imagine the consternation of King Rhampsinitus when he visited the chamber the following morning! Everything seemed as secure as ever, and yet, when he opened the door, there lay one of the great jars turned over and empty, while the lid of one of the chests was broken open and part of the contents scattered on the floor. He examined every nook and cranny of the chamber from floor to ceiling, and there was no sign of any one's having forced an entrance. The fastenings of the door were firm, and the lock was one which it was perfectly impossible to pick. For greater security, however, Rhampsinitus sent at once for a locksmith, and commanded him to fit the door with a second lock, the key of which he kept with the other.

Notwithstanding this precaution, the treasure-chamber was robbed again on the next night, and this time the thieves had broken open a great many of the chests, and carried away some of the most valuable jewels. On the following night a sentinel was posted, and still the treasury was robbed.

The sentinel vowed that he had stood with his back to the door all night, and there is little doubt that he spoke the truth, though the poor fellow was accused of sleeping at his post, and punished for his negligence.

Then the king took counsel of the fan-bearer on the right hand, who was also prime minister. He made a long speech, beginning with his regret that his majesty had not thought fit to consult him earlier, and concluding with a learned discourse on the habits of rats.

"This is all very interesting," said Rhampsinitus, "but I do not see that it helps very much to protect my treasure."

"I crave your majesty's pardon," the prime minister answered. "I was about to observe that the best way to catch a rat is first to study the habits and tastes of the rat, and next to apply the knowledge so gained in setting a trap."

From which one may see that the prime minister was a very learned man, and could not be expected to come to the point all at once. The king thanked him for his valuable advice, and procured two or three powerful man-traps, which he placed within his treasure-chamber.

Night came on, and the two thieves set to work as before, but no sooner had the younger brother disappeared through the hole in the wall than he began to utter loud cries of agony.

"Peace, brother! You will rouse the guard," said the elder. "What can have befallen you?"

The other controlled himself, and said with a groan, "Ladronius, we are ruined. I am held fast in a trap, and I think my leg is broken. O Horus, Lord of Life, deliver me!"

With some difficulty Ladronius crawled through the opening to aid his brother, for, though a thief, he was no coward.

"Go back, Ladronius, go back!" cried his brother. "Leave me to my fate! I think I hear the cries of the guard. No, brother, waste no more time!" he entreated, as Ladronius tugged in vain at the cruel teeth of the trap.

"One thing remains to be done. Cut off my head, and take it away with you, that I may not be recognized and so we both perish! I hear the footsteps of men approaching. Do not rob our mother of both her sons!"

And Ladronius, seeing that there was nothing else to be done, drew his sword, cut off his brother's head, and escaped through the opening, not forgetting to replace the stone behind him. He was only just in time, for scarcely had he gained the cover of a clump of trees, when the soldiers of the guard came running to the place and began to belabor the door. To their surprise they found everything quiet and nothing displaced. They examined the outside of the building thoroughly, and then, supposing that they had been roused by a false alarm, they returned to the palace.

In the morning, Rhampsinitus paid his daily visit to the chamber, and discovered the headless body in the trap. He was more puzzled than ever.

He examined the fastenings of the door and the whole of the chamber over and over again, and no hole nor crevice could he find.

"Nevertheless," said he, "I have now bait for my trap. What can I do better than set a thief to catch a thief?"

So he ordered the body to be hung from the outer wall of the chamber, and placed sentinels to guard it, strictly charging them to bring before him any one who showed pity or sorrow for the dead.

When the mother heard of her son's death and how the body had been treated, she reproached Ladronius bitterly for his cowardice, and implored him with many tears to bring back the body for proper burial. For the Egyptians thought that unless a man's body were properly embalmed and buried whole, he could have no life in the next world; so that it would be a terrible misfortune if the head and the body were buried separately.

Ladronius attempted to comfort his mother, but did not dare to carry off his brother's body so long as the sentinels were watching. In vain his mother wept and entreated him, until at last her grief was turned to anger, and she vowed that, if he did not obey her, she would go to the king and tell him the whole story. Then Ladronius, seeing her so determined, promised to do as she wished, and set his wits to work to invent some means of carrying off the body without being caught by the sentinels. At last he thought of a plan, which seemed to have some chance of success. He hired two donkeys, and having bought some wineskins, which were used in the place of bottles, he filled them with strong wine and placed them on the donkeys' backs.

Thus equipped, and dressed up to look like an old merchant, he set out for the place where his brother's body was suspended. When he drew near to the sentinels, he secretly loosened some of the strings which fastened the necks of the wineskins, and then whipping the donkeys and letting them run on a little way in front, he pursued them with loud cries.

"Oh, miserable wretch that I am!" he cried, beating his head and looking the very picture of despair. "All my good wine wasted on the ground! What shall I do? Oh, what shall I do? Stop, most ungrateful of donkeys, children of Set, that devour my substance and waste my wine as if it were water! May Tefnet plague you with gadflies, and Renenutet poison the thistles! Oh dear! oh dear! I am a ruined man."

The soldiers, supposing it to be a genuine accident, laughed loudly at the fellow's distress, and while some chased and caught the donkeys, the others brought bowls and pitchers and began to drink the wine, as it ran out of the skins.

"Never mind, worthy sir!" they said to Ladronius. "The wine is serving a very good purpose. Here is to our future friendship and your excellency's very good health!"

Ladronius pretended to fly into a great pa.s.sion, and called them thieves and monsters of iniquity for robbing a poor man of his wine.