really nice boy, as the girls instantly agreed; “you’ve only got to pick it.”

“Like this,” said Psyche, lifting her marble arms to a willow branch. She reached out her hand to the children—it held a ripe pomegranate.

“I see,” said Mabel. “You just—” She laid her fingers to the willow branch and the firm softness of a big peach was within them.

“Yes, just that,” laughed Psyche, who was a darling, as any one could see.

After this Hebe gathered a few silver baskets from a convenient alder, and the four picked fruit industriously. Meanwhile the elder statues were busy plucking golden goblets and jugs and dishes from the branches of ash-trees and young oaks and filling them with everything nice to eat and drink that anyone could possibly want, and these were spread on the steps. It was a celestial picnic. Then everyone sat or lay down and the feast began. And oh! the taste of the food served on those dishes, the sweet wonder of the drink that melted from those gold cups on the white lips of the company! And the fruit—there is no fruit like it grown on earth, just as there is no laughter like the laughter of those lips, no songs like the songs that stirred the silence of that night of wonder.

“Oh!” cried Kathleen, and through her fingers the juice of her third peach fell like tears on the marble steps. “I do wish the boys were here!”

“I do wonder what they’re doing,” said Mabel.

“At this moment,” said Hermes, who had just made a wide ring of flight, as a pigeon does, and come back into the circle—“at this moment they are wandering desolately near the home of the dinosaurus, having escaped from their home by a window, in search of you. They fear that you have perished, and they would weep if they did not know that tears do not become a man, however youthful.”

Kathleen stood up and brushed the crumbs of ambrosia from her marble lap.

“Thank you all very much,” she said. “It was very kind of you to have us, and we’ve enjoyed ourselves very much, but I think we ought to go now, please.”

“If it is anxiety about your brothers,” said Phoebus obligingly, “it is the easiest thing in the world for them to join you. Lend me your ring a moment.”

He took it from Kathleen’s half-reluctant hand, dipped it in the reflection of one of the seven moons, and gave it back. She clutched it. “Now,” said the Sun-god, “wish for them that which Mabel wished for herself Say—”

It was a celestial picnic

“I know,” Kathleen interrupted. “I wish that the boys may be statues of living marble like Mabel and me till dawn, and afterwards be like they are now.”

“If you hadn’t interrupted,” said Phoebus—“but there, we can’t expect old heads on shoulders of young marble. You should have wished them here—and—but no matter. Hermes, old chap, cut across and fetch them, and explain things as you come.”

He dipped the ring again in one of the reflected moons before he gave it back to Kathleen.

“There,” he said, “now it’s washed clean ready for the next magic.”

“It is not our custom to question guests,” said Heraew the queen, turning her great eyes on the children; but that ring excites, I am sure, the interest of us all.”

“It is the ring,” said Phoebus.

“That, of course,” said Hera; “but if it were not inhospitable to ask questions I should ask, How came it into the hands of these earth-children?”

“That,” said Phoebus, “is a long tale. After the feast the story, and after the story the song.”

Hermes seemed to have “explained everything” quite fully; for when Gerald and Jimmy in marble whiteness arrived, each clinging to one of the god’s winged feet, and so borne through the air, they were certainly quite at ease. They made their best bows to the goddesses and took their places as unembarrassed as though they had had Olympian suppers every night of their lives. Hebe had woven wreaths of roses ready for them, and as Kathleen watched them eating and drinking, perfectly at home in their marble, she was very glad that amid the welling springs of immortal peach-juice she had not forgotten her brothers.

“And now,” said Hera, when the boys had been supplied with everything they could possibly desire, and more than they could eat—“now for the story.”

“Yes,” said Mabel intensely; and Kathleen said, “Oh yes; now for the story. How splendid!

“The story,” said Phoebus unexpectedly, “will be