“Ibycus, who sang of love, material and divine, in Rhegium and in Samos, would wander forth in the world and make his lyre sound now by the sea and now in the mountain.  Wheresoever he went he was clad in the favor of all who loved song.  He became a wandering minstrel-poet.  The shepherd loved him, and the fisher; the trader and the mechanic sighed when he sang; the soldier and the king felt him at their hearts.  The old returned in their thoughts to youth, young men and maidens trembled in heavenly sound and light.  You would think that all the world loved Ibycus.

“Corinth, the jeweled city, planned her chariot-races and her festival of song.  The strong, the star-eyed young men, traveled to Corinth from mainland and from island, and those inner athletes and starry ones, the poets, traveled.  Great feasting was to be in Corinth, and contests of strength and flights of song, and in the theater, representation of gods and men.  Ibycus, the wandering poet, would go to Corinth, there perhaps to receive a crown.

“Ibycus, loved of all who love song, traveled alone, but not alone.  Yet shepherds, or women with their pitchers at the spring, saw but a poet with a staff and a lyre.  Now he was found upon the highroad, and now the country paths drew him, and the solemn woods where men most easily find God.  And so he approached Corinth.

“The day was calm and bright, with a lofty, blue, and stainless sky.  The heart of Ibycus grew warm, and there seemed a brighter light within the light cast by the sun.  Flower and plant and tree and all living things seemed to him to be glistening and singing, and to have for him, as he for them, a loving friendship.  And, looking up to the sky, he saw, drawn out stringwise, a flight of cranes, addressed to Egypt.  And between his heart and them ran, like a rippling path that the sun sends across the sea, a stream of good-will and understanding.  They seemed a part of himself, winged in the blue heaven, and aware of the part of him that trod earth, that was entering the grave and shadowy wood that neighbored Corinth.

“The cranes vanished from overhead, the sky arched without stain.  Ibycus, the sacred poet, with his staff and his lyre, went on into the wood.  Now the light faded and there was green gloom, like the depths of Father Sea.

     “Now robbers lay masked in the wood—­”

Jamie and Alice sat very still, listening.  Strickland kept his eyes on the reading youth.

“Now robbers lay masked in the wood—­violent men and treacherous, watching for the unwary, to take from them goods and, if they resisted, life.  In a dark place they lay in wait, and from thence they sprang upon Ibycus.  ’What hast thou?  Part it from thyself and leave it with us!’

“Ibycus, who could sing of the wars of the Greeks and the Trojans no less well than of the joys of young love, made stand, held