of
getting good value in return for their gifts. And, by result, instead
of living fat and hearty, I make lean meals off honey and grubs. It's
a poor life, a nymph's, in these latter years I tell you, my lord. It's
the fashion for all classes to believe in no kind of mystery now."

"What manner of pestilence is this you spoke of?"

"I have not seen it. Thank the Gods it has not come this way. But they
do say that it has grown from the folk Phorenice has slain, and whose
bodies remain unburied. She is always slaying, and so the bodies lie
thicker than the birds and beasts can eat them. For which of our sins,
I wonder, did the Gods let Phorenice come to reign? I wish that she and
her twins were boiled alive in brine before they came between an honest
nymph of the forest and her living.

"They say she has put an image of herself in all the temples of the
city now, and has ordered prayers and sacrifices to be made night
and morning. She has decreed all other Gods inferior to herself
and forbidden their worship, and those of the people that are not
sufficiently devout for her taste, have their hamstrings slit by their
tormentors to aid them constantly into a devotional attitude.--Will you
eat of my grubs and honey? There is nothing else. Your back was bloody
with carrying meat when I met you, but you had lost your load. You must
either taste this mess of mine now, or go without."

I harboured with that nymph in cave six days, she using her drugs and
charms to cure my leg the while, and when I was recovered, I hunted the
plains and killed her a fat cloven-hoofed horse as payment, and then
went along my ways.

The country from there onwards had at one time carried a sturdy
population which held its own firmly, and, as its numbers grew, took in
more ground, and built more homesteads farther afield. The houses were
perched in trees for the most part, as there they were out of reach
of cave-bear and cave-tiger and the other more dangerous beasts. But
others, and these were the better ones, were built on the ground, of
logs so ponderous and so firmly clamped and dovetailed that the beasts
could not pull them down, and once inside a house of this fashion
its owners were safe, and could progue at any attackers through the
interstices between the logs, and often wound, sometimes make a kill.

But not one in ten of these outlying settlers remained. The houses were
silent when I reached them, the fire-hearth before the door weed