“Look,” cried I, “here is breakfast all ready for you.”  So saying, I lifted my wallet from my shoulders, handed him some bread and cheese, and said, “Let us sit down near that plane-tree.”  We did so, and I helped myself to some refreshment.  While looking at him more closely, as he was eating with a voracious appetite, I saw that he was faint, and of a hue like boxwood.  His natural color, in fact, had so forsaken him, that as I recalled those nocturnal furies to my frightened imagination, the very first piece of bread I put in my mouth, though exceedingly small, stuck in the middle of my throat and would pass neither downward nor upward.  Besides, the number of people passing along increased my fears; for who would believe that one of two companions could meet his death except at the hands of the other?

Presently, after having gorged himself with food, he began to be impatient for some drink, for he had bolted the larger part of an excellent cheese.  Not far from the roots of the plane-tree a gentle stream flowed slowly along, like a placid lake, rivaling silver or crystal.

“Look,” said I:  “drink your fill of the water of this stream, bright as the Milky Way.”

He arose, and, wrapping himself in his cloak, with his knees doubled under him, knelt down upon the shelving bank and bent greedily toward the water.  Scarcely had he touched its surface with his lips, when the wound in his throat burst open and the sponge rolled out, a few drops of blood with it; and his lifeless body would have fallen into the river had I not laid hold of one of his feet, and dragged him with great difficulty and labor to the top of the bank.  There, having mourned my hapless comrade as much as there was time, I buried him in the sandy soil that bordered the stream.  Then, trembling and terror-stricken, I fled through various unfrequented places; and as though guilty of homicide, abandoned my country and my home, embraced a voluntary exile, and now dwell in AEtolia, where I have married another wife.

Translated for ‘A Library of the World’s Best Literature.’

THE AWAKENING OF CUPID

[The radical difference in the constituent parts of the ‘Golden Ass’ is startling, and is well illustrated by the selection given previously and that which follows.  The story of the “drummer” comports exactly with the modern idea of realism in fiction:  a vivid and unflinching picture of manners and morals, full of broad coarse humor and worldly wit.  The story of Cupid and Psyche is the purest, daintiest, most poetic of fancies; in essence a fairy tale that might be told of an evening by the fire-light in the second century or the nineteenth, but embodying also a high and beautiful allegory, and treated with a delicate art which is in extreme contrast with the body of the ‘Golden Ass.’  The difference is almost as striking as between Gray’s lampoon on “Jemmy Twitcher”