In less than an hour Mother Ceres got down at the door of her cottage.  It was empty!  At first she thought “Oh, Proserpina will still be playing on the shore with the sea-children.”  So she went to find her.

“Where is Proserpina, you naughty sea-children?” she asked; “tell me, have you taken her to your home under the sea?”

“Oh no, Mother Ceres,” they said, “she left us early in the day to gather flowers for a wreath, and we have seen nothing of her since.”

Ceres hurried off to ask all the neighbors.  A poor fisherman had seen her little footprints in the sand as he went home with his basket of fish.

A man in the fields had noticed her gathering flowers.

Several persons had heard the rattling of chariot wheels or the rumbling of distant thunder:  and one old woman had heard a scream, but supposed it was only merriment, and had not even looked up.

None of the neighbors knew where Proserpina was, and Mother Ceres decided she must seek her daughter further from home.

By this time it was night, so she lit a torch and set off, telling the neighbors she would never come back till Proserpina was found.  In her hurry she quite forgot her chariot with the dragons; may be she thought she could search better on foot.

So she started on her sad journey, holding her torch in front of her, and looking carefully along every road and round every corner.

She had not gone very far before she found one of the wonderful flowers which Proserpina had pulled from the poison bush.

“Ha!” said Mother Ceres, examining it carefully, “there is mischief in this flower:  it did not grow in the earth by any help of mine; it is the work of magic, and perhaps it has poisoned my poor child.”  And she hid it in her bosom.

All night long Ceres sought for her daughter.  She knocked at the doors of farm-houses where the people were all asleep, and they came to see who was there, rubbing their eyes and yawning.  They were very sorry for the poor mother when they heard her tale—­but they knew nothing about Proserpina.

At every palace door, too, she knocked, so loudly that the servants ran quickly, expecting to find a great queen, and when they saw only a sad lonely woman with a burning torch in her hand, and a wreath of withered poppies on her head, they were angry and drove her rudely away.

But nobody had seen Proserpina, and Mother Ceres wandered about till the night was passed, without sitting down to rest, and without taking any food.  She did not even remember to put out her torch, and it looked very pale and small in the bright morning sunshine.

It must have been a magic torch, for it burned dimly all day, and then when night came it shone with a beautiful red light, and neither the wind nor the rain put it out through all these weary days while Ceres sought for Proserpina.

It was not only men and women that Mother Ceres questioned about her daughter.  In the woods and by the streams she met other creatures whose way of talking she could understand, and who knew many things that we have never learned.