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drooping head and wearied by his long childish play, sinks to slumber, deep buried in the luxuriant earth, while one hand holds the grass tight-clutched.

Meanwhile an earth-born serpent, the accursed terror of the Achaean grove, arises on the mead, and loosely dragging his huge bulk now bears it forward, now leaves it behind him. A livid gleam is in his eyes, the green spume of foaming poison in his fangs, and a threefold quivering tongue, with three rows of hooked teeth, and a cruel blazonry rises high upon his gilded forehead. The Inachian countrymen held him sacred to the Thunderer, who has the guardianship of the place and the scant worship of the woodland altars; and now he glides with trailing coils about the shrines, now grinds the hapless forest oaks and crushes huge ash-trees in his embrace; oft lies he in continuous length from bank to bank across the streams, and the river sundered by his scales swells high. But fiercer now, when all the land is panting at the command of the Ogygian god^[1] and the Nymphs are hurrying to the hiding of their dusty beds, he twists his tortuous writhing frame upon the ground, and the fire of his parched venom fills him with a baneful rage. Over pools and arid lakes and stifled springs he winds his way, and wanders in the riverless valleys, and consumed by burning thirst^[2] now flings back his head and laps the liquid air, now brushing o’er the groaning fields cleaves downward to the earth, should there be any sap or moisture in the grasses; but the herbage falls stricken by his hot breath, whereso’er he turns his head, and the mead shrivels at the hissing of his jaws; vast is he as the Snake that divides the pole from the Northern Wain and passes even unto the Southern winds and an