d! And where may this person come from? What is it to you if
we are chatterboxes? Give orders to your own servants, sir. Do you pretend
to command the ladies of Syracuse? If you must know, we are Corinthians by
descent, like Bellerophon himself, and we speak Peloponnesian. Dorian
women may lawfully speak Doric, I presume."

This is enough to silence the critic, but the other young woman also turns
upon him, and we may suppose that he is glad to escape from their tongues.
And then everybody becomes silent, for the religious services begin. The
priestess, a comely girl, chants the psalm of Adonis, the beautiful old
pagan hymn, more beautiful and more sensuous than anything uttered by the
later religious poets of the West; and all listen in delighted stillness.
As the hymn ends, Gorgo bursts out in exclamation of praise:

"Praxinoe! The woman is cleverer than we fancied! Happy woman to know so
much!--Thrice happy to have so sweet a voice! Well, all the same, it is
time to be making for home; Diocleides has not had his dinner, and the man
is all vinegar,--don't venture near him when he is kept waiting for
dinner. Farewell, beloved Adonis--may you find us glad at your next
coming."

And with this natural mingling of the sentimental and the commonplace the
little composition ends. It is as though we were looking through some
window into the life of two thousand years ago. Read the whole thing over
to yourselves when you have time to find the book in the library, and see
how true to human nature it is. There is nothing in it except the
wonderful hymn, which does not belong to to-day as much as to the long
ago, to modern Tokyo as much as to ancient Greece. That is what makes the
immortality of any literary production--not simply truth to the life of
one time, but truth to the life of every time and place.

Not many years ago there was discovered a book by Herodas, a Greek writer
of about the same period. It is called the "Mimes," a series of little
dramatic studies picturing the life of the time. One of these is well
worthy of rank with the idyl of Theocritus above mentioned. It is the
study of a conversation between a young woman and an old woman. The young
woman has a husband, who left her to join a military expedition and has
not been heard of for several years. The old woman is a go-between, and
she comes to see the young person on behalf of another young man, who
admires her. But as soon as she states the nature of her e