SERV.  I know this; but now we are in circumstances not such as are fit for revel and mirth.

HER.  The lady that is dead is a stranger; grieve not too much, for the lords of this house live.

SERV.  What live! knowest thou not the misery within the house?

HER.  Unless thy lord hath told me any thing falsely.

SERV.  He is too, too hospitable.

HER.  Is it unmeet that I should be well treated, because a stranger is dead?

SERV.  Surely however she was very near.

HER.  Has he forborne to tell me any calamity that there is?

SERV.  Depart and farewell; we have a care for the evils of our lords.

HER.  This speech is the beginning of no foreign loss.

SERV.  For I should not, had it been foreign, have been grieved at seeing thee reveling.

HER.  What! have I received so great an injury from mine host?

SERV.  Thou camest not in a fit time for the house to receive thee, for there is grief to us, and thou seest that we are shorn, and our black garments.

HER.  But who is it that is dead?  Has either any of his children died, or his aged father?

SERV.  The wife indeed of Admetus is dead, O stranger.

HER.  What sayst thou? and yet did ye receive me?

SERV. Yes, for he had too much respect to turn thee from his house.

HER.  O unhappy man, what a wife hast thou lost!

SERV.  We all are lost, not she alone.

HER.  But I did perceive it indeed, when I saw his eye streaming with tears, and his shorn hair, and his countenance; but he persuaded me, saying, that he was conducting the funeral of a stranger to the tomb:  but spite of my inclination having passed over these gates, I drank in the house of the hospitable man, while he was in this case, and reveled, crowned as to my head with garlands.  But ’twas thine to tell me not to do it, when such an evil was upon the house.  Where is he burying her? whither going can I find her?

SERV.  By the straight road that leads to Larissa, thou wilt see the polished tomb beyond the suburbs.

HERCULES.

O my much-daring heart and my soul, now show what manner of son the Tirynthian Alcmena, daughter of Electryon, bare thee to Jove.  For I must rescue the woman lately dead, Alcestis, and place her again in this house, and perform this service for Admetus.  And going I will lay wait for the sable-vested king of the departed, Death, and I think that I shall find him drinking of the libations near the tomb.  And if having taken him by lying in wait, rushing from my ambush, I shall seize hold of him, and make a circle around him with mine arms, there is not who shall take him away panting as to his sides, until he release me the woman.  But if however I fail of this capture, and he come not to the clottered mass of blood, I will go a journey beneath to the sunless