“Another idol shattered!” I cried, in mock grief.  “But Apollo, Hippopopolis—­Apollo!  Do not tell me he is not a virtuoso of rare technique on the lyre!”

“His technique is more than rare,” sneered Hippopopolis.  “It is excessively raw.  It has been said by men who have heard both that Nero of Hades can do more to move an audience with his fiddle with two strings broken and his bow wrist sprained than Apollo can do with the aid of his lyre and a special dispensation of divine inspiration from Zeus himself.”

“There are various ways of moving audiences, Hippopopolis,” I ventured.  “Now Nero, I should say, could move an audience—­out of the hall—­in a very few moments.  In fact, I have always believed that that is why he fiddled when Rome was burning:  so that people would run out of the city limits before they perished.”

“It’s a very droll view,” laughed Hippopopolis, “and I dare say holds much of the truth; but Nero’s faulty execution is not proof of Apollo’s virtuosity.  For a woodland musicale given by the Dryads, say, to their friends, the squirrels and moles and wild-cats, and other denizens of the forest, Apollo will suffice.  The musical taste of a kangaroo might find the strumming of his lyre by Apollo to its liking, but for cultivated people who know a crescendo andante-arpeggio from the staccato tones of a penny whistle, he is inadequate.”

“You speak as if you had heard the god,” said I.

“I have not,” retorted Hippopopolis, “but I have heard playing by people, generally beginners, of whom the rural press has said that he—­or more often she—­has the touch of an Apollo, and, if that is true, as are all things we read in the newspapers, particularly the rural papers, which are not so sophisticated as to lie, then Apollo would better not attempt to play at one of our Athenian Courier Association Smokers.  I venture to assert that if he did he would have to be carried home with a bandage about his brow instead of a laurel, and his cherished lyre would become but a memory.”

I turned sadly to my supper.  I had found the mundane things of Greece disappointing enough, but my sorrow over Hippopopolis’s expert testimony as to the shortcoming of the gods was overwhelming.  It was to be expected that the country would fall into a decadent state sooner or later, but that the Olympians themselves were not all that they were cracked up to be by the mythologies had never suggested itself to me.  As a result of my courier’s words, I lapsed into a moody silence, which by eight o’clock developed into an irresistible desire to sleep.

“I’ll take a nap, Hippopopolis,” said I, rolling my coat into a bundle and placing it under my head.  “You will, I trust, be good enough to stand guard lest some of these gods you have mentioned come and pick my pockets?” I added, satirically.

“I will see that the gods do not rob you,” he returned, dryly, with a slight emphasis on the word “gods,” the significance of which I did not at the moment take in, but which later developments made all too clear.