s, invented for his mysteries. Bacchantes, Thyades,
and Maenads, girt with the dappled fawn-skin, waved the thyrsus encircled
with ivy. He bore in his train the Satyrs, whose joyous troop I led,
Sileni, Pans, and Centaurs. Under his feet flowers and fruit sprang to
life, and striking the rocks with his wand he made limpid streams gush
forth. In the month of the Vintage he visited Greece, and the villagers
ran forth to meet him, stained with the green and ruddy juices of the
plants, they wore masks of wood, or bark, or leaves; in their hands they
bore earthen cups, and danced wanton dances. Their womenfolk, imitating
the companions of the God, their heads wreathed with green smilax,
fastened round their supple loins skins of fawn or goat. The virgins
twined about their throats garlands of fig leaves, they kneaded cakes of
flour, and bore the Phallus in the mystic basket. And the vine-dressers,
all daubed with lees of wine, standing up in their wains and bandying
mockery or abuse with the passers-by, invented Tragedy.

"Truly, it was not in dreaming beside a fountain, but by dint of
strenuous toil that Dionysus taught them to grow plants and to make them
bring forth succulent fruits. And while he pondered the art of
transforming the rough woodlanders into a race that should love music
and submit to just laws, more than once over his brow, burning with the
fire of enthusiasm, did melancholy and gloomy fever pass. But his
profound knowledge and his friendship for mankind enabled him to triumph
over every obstacle. O days divine! Beautiful dawn of life! We led the
Bacchanals on the leafy summits of the mountains and on the yellow
shores of the seas. The Naiads and the Oreads mingled with us at our
play. Aphrodite at our coming rose from the foam of the sea to smile
upon us."

CHAPTER XIX

THE GARDENER'S STORY, CONTINUED

"When men had learned to cultivate the earth, to herd cattle, to enclose
their holy places within walls, and to recognise the gods by their
beauty, I withdrew to that smiling land girdled with dark woods and
watered by the Stymphalos, the Olbios, the Erymanthus, and the proud
Crathis, swollen with the icy waters of the Styx, and there, in a green
valley at the foot of a hill planted with arbutus, olive, and pine,
beneath a cluster of white poplars and plane trees, by the side of a
stream flowing with soft murmur amid tufted mastic trees, I sang to the
shepherds and the nymphs of the birth of