Often, likewise, she encountered fauns, who looked like sunburnt country people, except that they had hairy ears, and little horns upon their foreheads, and the hinder legs of goats, on which they gamboled merrily about the woods and fields.  They were a frolicsome kind of creature, but grew as sad as their cheerful dispositions would allow when Ceres inquired for her daughter, and they had no good news to tell.  But sometimes she came suddenly upon a rude gang of satyrs, who had faces like monkeys and horses’ tails behind them, and who were generally dancing in a very boisterous manner, with shouts of noisy laughter.  When she stopped to question them, they would only laugh the louder, and make new merriment out of the lone woman’s distress.  How unkind of those ugly satyrs!  And once, while crossing a solitary sheep pasture, she saw a personage named Pan, seated at the foot of a tall rock.  And making music on a shepherd’s flute.  He, too, had horns and hairy ears, and goat’s feet; but being acquainted with Mother Ceres, he answered her question as civilly as he knew how, and invited her to taste some milk and honey out of a wooden bowl.  But neither could Pan tell her what had become of Proserpina, any better than the rest of these wild people.

And thus Mother Ceres went wandering about for nine long days and nights, finding no trace of Proserpina, unless it were now and then a withered flower; and these, she picked up and put in her bosom, because she fancied that they might have fallen from her poor child’s hand.  All day she traveled onward through the hot sun; and at night, again, the flame of the torch would redden and gleam along the pathway, and she continued her search by its light, without ever sitting down to rest.

On the tenth day, she chanced to espy the mouth of a cavern, within which (though it was bright noon everywhere else) there would have been only a dusky twilight:  but it so happened that a torch was burning there.  It flickered and struggled with the duskiness, but could not half light up the gloomy cavern with all its melancholy glimmer.  Ceres was resolved to leave no spot without a search; so she peeped into the entrance of the cave, and lighted it up a little more by holding her own torch before her.  In so doing, she caught a glimpse of what seemed to be a woman, sitting on the brown leaves of the last autumn, a great heap of which had been swept into the cave by the wind.  This woman (if woman it were) was by no means so beautiful as many of her sex:  for her head, they tell me, was shaped very much like a dog’s, and, by way of ornament, she wore a wreath of snakes around it.  But Mother Ceres, the moment she saw her, knew that this was an odd kind of a person, who put all her enjoyment in being miserable, and never would have a word to say to other people, unless they were as melancholy and wretched as she herself delighted to be.

“I am wretched enough now,” thought poor Ceres, “to talk with this melancholy Hecate, were she ten times sadder than ever she was yet.”