As soon as this happened, he knew what was to be done; for he had not gone through so many remarkable adventures without learning pretty well how to conduct himself, whenever anything came to pass a little out of the common rule.  It was just as clear as daylight that this marvellous cup had been set adrift by some unseen power, and guided hitherward, in order to carry Hercules across the sea, on his way to the garden of the Hesperides.  Accordingly, without a moment’s delay, he clambered over the brim, and slid down on the inside, where, spreading out his lion’s skin, he proceeded to take a little repose.  He had scarcely rested, until now, since he bade farewell to the damsels on the margin of the river.  The waves dashed, with a pleasant and ringing sound, against the circumference of the hollow cup; it rocked lightly to and fro, and the motion was so soothing that it speedily rocked Hercules into an agreeable slumber.

His nap had probably lasted a good while, when the cup chanced to graze against a rock, and, in consequence, immediately resounded and reverberated through its golden or brazen substance, a hundred times as loudly as ever you heard a church bell.  The noise awoke Hercules, who instantly started up and gazed around him, wondering whereabouts he was.  He was not long in discovering that the cup had floated across a great part of the sea, and was approaching the shore of what seemed to be an island.  And, on that island, what do you think he saw?

No; you will never guess it, not if you were to try fifty thousand times!  It positively appears to me that this was the most marvellous spectacle that had ever been seen by Hercules in the whole course of his wonderful travels and adventures.  It was a greater marvel than the hydra with nine heads, which kept growing twice as fast as they were cut off; greater than the six-legged man monster; greater than Antaeus; greater than anything that was ever beheld by anybody, before or since the days of Hercules, or than anything that remains to be beheld by travellers in all time to come.  It was a giant!

But such an intolerably big giant!  A giant as tall as a mountain; so vast a giant that the clouds rested about his midst, like a girdle, and hung like a hoary beard from his chin, and flitted before his huge eyes, so that he could neither see Hercules nor the golden cup in which he was voyaging.  And, most wonderful of all, the giant held up his great hands and appeared to support the sky, which, so far as Hercules could discern through the clouds, was resting upon his head!  This does really seem almost too much to believe.

Meanwhile, the bright cup continued to float onward, and finally touched the strand.  Just then a breeze wafted away the clouds from before the giant’s visage, and Hercules beheld it, with all its enormous features; eyes each of them as big as yonder lake, a nose a mile long, and a mouth of the same width.  It was a countenance terrible from its enormity of size, but disconsolate and weary, even as you may see the faces of many people, nowadays, who are compelled to sustain burdens above their strength.  What the sky was to the giant, such are the cares of earth to those who let themselves be weighed down by them.  And whenever men undertake what is beyond the just measure of their abilities, they encounter precisely such a doom as had befallen this poor giant.