Favorite Greek Myths (1904)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HOW APOLLO GOT HIS LYRE Mercury was the child of Maia, the eldest of the Pleiades, and lived with his mother in a cave among the mountains. One day, when he was only just big enough to walk, he ran out of doors to play in the sunshine, and saw a spotted tortoise-shell lying in the grass. He laughed with pleasure at sight of the pretty thing, and quickly carried it into the cave. Then he bored holes in the edge of the shell, fastened hollow reeds inside, and with a piece of leather and strings made a lyre of it. This was the first lyre that was ever made, and most wonderful music lay hidden in it. That night, when his mother was asleep, Mercury crept slyly out of his cradle and went out into the moonlight; he ran to the pastures where Apollo's white cattle were sleeping, and stole fifty of the finest heifers. Then he threw his baby-shoes into the ocean, and bound great limbs of tamarisk to his feet, so that no one would be able to tell who had been walking in the soft sand. After this, he drove the cattle hither and thither in great glee for a while, and then took them down the mountain and shut them into a cave ? but one would think from the tracks left in the sand that the cattle had been driven up, instead of down the mountain. A peasant, who was hoeing in his vineyard by the light of the full moon, saw this wonderful baby pass by, driving the cattle, and could hardly believe his own eyes. No one else saw Mercury; and just at sunrise, the little mischief went home to his mother's cave, slipped in through the keyhole, and in a twinkling was in his cradle with his tortoise-shell lyre held tightly in his arms, looking as if he had been sleeping there all night. Apollo soon missed his cattle. It happened that the man who had been hoeing his grape-vines by moonlight w...… (more)