Mortals, for all time, though, have followed the example of the giants and have tried to use their strength in battle for pillage. They have destroyed beautiful buildings and put out home fires and interfered with teaching and music and painting and writing, because they could not see the light shining in these. But what usually happens to them in the end is just what happened to the giants who started out to destroy Mount Olympus. They find that they have pulled a volcano down over their shoulders.
HOW VULCAN MADE THE BEST OF THINGS
No one wanted Vulcan at Olympus because he was a cripple. His mother, Juno, was ashamed of him, and his father, the great Jupiter, had the same kind of feeling, that it was a disgrace to have a son who was misshapen and must always limp as he took his way among the other straight limbed gods.
But Vulcan had a desire to be of service to his fellows. There was once an assemblage of the gods at which they were to discuss important matters of heaven and earth, and Vulcan offered his help as cup bearer for the company. He made a droll figure hobbling from seat to seat with the great golden cup, and some of the gods laughed at him.
At last they threw Vulcan out of the skies and he fell for an entire day, so far was it from Olympus to the earth. Near sunset he found himself lying on the ground beside a smoking mountain, bruised and more handicapped than he had ever been before. He had fallen to the island of Lemnos in the Aegean Sea.
It was a bare, unbeautiful place, for the coast was set thick with volcanoes that poured forth burning metal at intervals from one year's end to another. The Sintians, who were the only inhabitants of the island of Lemnos, had scant means of subsistence because the land was unfertile and few ships dared anchor at their shores under the rain of fire from the volcano that might destroy them. These people of Lemnos were a kind, simple folk, though, and they had a great pity for Vulcan. They gathered about him and bound up his wounds with healing herbs. They shared their scanty store of fruit with him, and they hastened to prepare him a tent. But when the Sintians returned to the foot of the mountain Mosychlos where they had left Vulcan he was gone.
"We dreamed of this visitor from the gods," they decided. "It was only a falling star that we watched, dropped from the zenith."
Seasons passed and at last it was noticed that the fiery Mosychlos was only smoking. It no longer threatened the lives of the inhabitants of Lemnos with its red hot torrents. The same fact was to be noted about the other volcanoes; they seemed more like the smoking, sooty chimneys of our factories of to-day than the towers of death they had been before. And above the sound of the surf and the wailing of the wind there could be heard a new sound, the steady beating of a hammer on metal as a smith strikes his ringing blows from morning until night.