swans resort. Nile fled away and
hid his head in the desert, and there it still remains concealed. Where
he used to discharge his waters through seven mouths into the sea, seven
dry channels alone remained. The earth cracked open and through the
chinks light broke into Tartarus and frightened the king of shadows and
his queen. The sea shrank up. Even Nereus and his wife Doris with the
Nereids, their daughters, sought the deepest caves for refuge. Thrice
Neptune essayed to raise his head above the surface and thrice was
driven back by the heat. Earth, surrounded as she was by waters, yet
with head and shoulders bare, screening her face with her hand, looked
up to heaven, and with husky voice prayed Jupiter, if it were his will
that she should perish by fire, to end her agony at once by his
thunderbolts, or else to consider his own Heaven, how both the poles
were smoking that sustained his palace, and that all must fall if they
were destroyed.

Earth, overcome with heat and thirst, could say no more. Then Jupiter,
calling the gods to witness that all was lost unless some speedy remedy
were applied, thundered, brandished a lightning bolt in his right hand,
launched it against the charioteer, and struck him at the same moment
from his seat and from existence. Phaethon, with his hair on fire, fell
headlong, like a shooting star which marks the heavens with its
brightness as it falls, and Eridanus, the great river, received him and
cooled his burning frame. His sisters, the Heliades, as they lamented
his fate, were turned into poplar trees on the banks of the river; and
their tears, which continued to flow, became amber as they dropped into
the stream. The Italian Naiads reared a tomb for him and inscribed
these words upon the stone:

Driver of Phoebus' chariot, Phaethon,
Struck by Jove's thunder, rests beneath this stone.
He could not rule his father's car of fire,
Yet was it much so nobly to aspire.

* * * * *

The Norse myths originated among peoples who lived in the country which
is now Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland. In these lands of the
North, winter is long and dark, and the intense cold is not easily
endured; but summer brings sunshine, warmth, and happiness. It is not
strange, therefore, that the evil spirits of Norse mythology should be
represented as huge frost giants and mountain giants. These giants, or
Jotuns, were first formed from the