thanks to his reluctant
parent. But the steeds soon perceived that the load they drew was
lighter than usual; and as a ship without its accustomed weight, was
dashed about as if empty. The horses rushed headlong and left the
traveled road. Then, for the first time, the Great and Little Bears were
scorched with heat, and would fain, if it were possible, have plunged
into the water; and the Serpent which lies coiled round the north pole,
torpid and harmless, grew warm, and with warmth felt its rage revive.
Booetes, they say, fled away, though encumbered with his plow and unused
to rapid motion.

When hapless Phaethon looked down upon the earth, now spreading in vast
extent beneath him, he grew pale, and his knees shook with terror. He
lost his self-command and knew not whether to draw tight the reins or
throw them loose; he forgot the names of the horses. But when he beheld
the monstrous forms scattered over the surface of heaven,--the Scorpion
extending two great arms, his tail, and his crooked claws over the space
of two signs of the zodiac,--when the boy beheld him, reeking with
poison and menacing with fangs, his courage failed, and the reins fell
from his hands. The horses, unrestrained, went off into unknown regions
of the sky in among the stars, hurling the chariot over pathless places,
now up in high heaven, now down almost to the earth. The moon saw with
astonishment her brother's chariot running beneath her own. The clouds
began to smoke. The forest-clad mountains burned,--Athos and Taurus and
Tmolus and Oete; Ida, once celebrated for fountains; the Muses' mountain
Helicon, and Haemus; Aetna, with fires within and without, and
Parnassus, with his two peaks, and Rhodope, forced at last to part with
his snowy crown. Her cold climate was no protection to Scythia; Caucasus
burned, and Ossa and Pindus, and, greater than both, Olympus,--the Alps
high in air, and the Apennines crowned with clouds.

Phaethon beheld the world on fire and felt the heat intolerable. Then,
too, it is said, the people of Aethiopia became black because the blood
was called by the heat so suddenly to the surface; and the Libyan desert
was dried up to the condition in which it remains to this day. The
Nymphs of the fountains, with disheveled hair, mourned their waters, nor
were the rivers safe beneath their banks; Tanais smoked, and Caicus,
Xanthus, and Maeander; Babylonian Euphrates and Ganges, Tagus, with
golden sands, and Cayster, where the