ously.

Last came Perseus: he had no gift to give, for he had nothing of his
own. The others began to sneer at him, saying, 'Here is a birthday guest
without a birthday gift!' 'How should No Man's son have a present fit
for a king.' 'This lad is lazy, tied to his mother; he should long ago
have taken service with the captain of a merchant ship.' 'He might at
least watch the town's cows on the town's fields,' said another. Thus
they insulted Perseus, and the king, watching him with a cruel smile,
saw his face grow red, and his blue eyes blaze, as he turned from one to
another of the mockers, who pointed their fingers at him and jeered.

At last Perseus spoke: 'Ye farmers and fishers, ye ship-captains and
slave dealers of a little isle, I shall bring to your master such a
present as none of you dare to seek. Farewell. Ye shall see me once
again and no more. I go to slay the Gorgon, and bring such a gift as no
king possesses--the Head of the Gorgon.'

They laughed and hooted, but Perseus turned away, his hand on his sword
hilt, and left them to their festival, while the king rejoiced in his
heart. Perseus dared not see his mother again, but he spoke to Dictys,
saying that he knew himself now to be of an age when he must seek his
fortune in other lands; and he bade Dictys guard his mother from wrong,
as well as he might. Dictys promised that he would find a way of
protecting Danae, and he gave Perseus three weighed wedges of gold
(which were called 'talents,' and served as money), and lent him a ship,
to take him to the mainland of Greece, there to seek his fortune.

In the dawn Perseus secretly sailed away, landed at Malea, and thence
walked and wandered everywhere, seeking to learn the way to the island
of the Gorgons. He was poorly clad, and he slept at night by the fires
of smithies, where beggars and wanderers lay: listening to the stories
they told, and asking old people, when he met them, if they knew any one
who knew the way to the island of the Gorgons. They all shook their
heads. 'Yet I should be near knowing,' said one old man, 'if that isle
be close to the Land of the Dead, for I am on its borders. Yet I know
nothing. Perchance the dead may know; or the maid that prophesies at
Pytho, or the Selloi, the priests with unwashen feet, who sleep on the
ground below the sacred oaks of Zeus in the grove of Dodona far away.'

Perseus could learn no more than this, and he wandered on and on. He
went to the cave that l