on all the gods for mercy.

"She is so little!" she wailed. "So young--so dear! Ah, spare me
_one_," she said, "only one out of so many!"

But the gods laughed. Like a harsh note of music sounded the twang of
Diana's bow. Pierced by a silver arrow, the little girl lay dead. The
dignity of Latona was avenged.

Overwhelmed by despair, King Amphion killed himself, and Niobe was
left alone to gaze on the ruin around her. For nine days she sat, a
Greek Rachel, weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted,
because they were not. On the tenth day, the sight was too much even
for the superhuman hearts of the gods to endure. They turned the
bodies into stone and themselves buried them. And when they looked on
the face of Niobe and saw on it a bleeding anguish that no human hand
could stay nor the word of any god comfort, the gods were merciful.
Her grief was immortalised, for Niobe, at their will, became a stone,
and was carried by a wailing tempest to the summit of Mount Sipylus,
in Lydia, where a spring of Argos bore her name. Yet although a rock
was Niobe, from her blind eyes of stone the tears still flowed, a
clear stream of running water, symbol of a mother's anguish and
never-ending grief.

HYACINTHUS

... "The sad death
Of Hyacinthus, when the cruel breath
Of Zephyr slew him--Zephyr penitent
Who now, ere Phoebus mounts the firmament,
Fondles the flower amid the sobbing rain."

Keats.

"Whom the gods love die young"--truly it would seem so, as we read the
old tales of men and of women beloved of the gods. To those men who
were deemed worthy of being companions of the gods, seemingly no good
fortune came. Yet, after all, if even in a brief span of life they had
tasted god-given happiness, was their fate one to be pitied? Rather
let us keep our tears for those who, in a colourless grey world, have
seen the dull days go past laden with trifling duties, unnecessary
cares and ever-narrowing ideals, and have reached old age and the
grave--no narrower than their lives--without ever having known a
fulness of happiness, such as the Olympians knew, or ever having dared
to reach upwards and to hold fellowship with the Immortals.

Hyacinthus was a Spartan youth, son of Clio, one of the Muses, and of
the mortal with whom she had mated, and from mother, or father, or
from the gods themselves, he had received the gift of beauty. It
chanced one day that as Apollo drove h