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harpies_, birds of prey of prodigious size and most offensive habits, and fierce and voracious beyond description. The harpies were celebrated, in fact, in many of the ancient tales, as a race of beings that infested certain shores, and often teased and tormented the mariners and adventurers that happened to come among them. Some said, however, that there was not a race of such beings, but only two or three in all, and they gave their names. And yet different narrators gave different names, among which were Aelopos, Nicothoe, Ocythoe, Ocypoae, Celaeno, Acholoe, and Aello. Some said that the harpies had the faces and forms of women. Others described them as frightfully ugly; but all agree in representing them as voracious beyond description, always greedily devouring every thing that they could get within reach of their claws. These fierce monsters flew down upon AEneas and his party, and carried away the food from off the table before them; and even attacked the men themselves. The men then armed themselves with swords, secretly, and waited for the next approach of the harpies, intending to kill them, when they came near. But the nimble marauders eluded all their blows, and escaped with their plunder as before. At length the expedition was driven away from the island altogether, by these ravenous fowls, and when they were embarking on board of their vessels, the leader of the harpies perched herself upon a rock overlooking the scene, and in a human voice loaded AEneas and his companions, as they went away, with taunts and execrations. The expedition passed one night in great terror and dread in the vicinity of Mount Etna, where they had landed. The awful eruptions of smoke, and flame, and burning lava, which issued at midnight from the summit of the mountain,--the thundering sounds which they heard rolling beneath them, through the ground, and the dread which was inspired in their minds by the terrible monsters that dwelt beneath the mountains, as they supposed, and fed the fires, all combined to impress them with a sense of unutterable awe; and as soon as the light of the morning enabled them to resume their course, they made all haste to get away from so appalling a scene. At another time they touched upon a coast which was inhabited by a race of one-eyed giants,--monsters of enormous magnitude and of remorseless cruelty. They were cannibals,--feeding on the bodies of men whom they killed by grasping them in their
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