Mary Pynchon, beautiful and winning girl, afterward wedded to Elizur Holyoke.
John Pynchon, a promising boy.—J. G. Holland, The Bay Path (1857).
Pyncheon (Col.). An old bachelor, possessed of great wealth, and of an eccentric and melancholy turn of mind, the owner and tenant of the old Pyncheon mansion. He dies suddenly, after a life of selfish devotion to his own interests, and is thus found when the house is opened in the morning.—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851).
Pyrac´mon, one of Vulcan’s workmen in the smithy of Mount Etna. (Greek, pûr akmôn, “fire anvil.”)
Far passing Bronteus or Pyracmon great,
The which in Lipari do day and night
Frame thunderbolts for Jove.
Spenser, Faëry Queen, iv. 5 (1596).
Pyramid. According to Diodo´rus Sic´ulus (Hist., i.), and Pliny (Nat. Hist., xxxvi. 12), there were 360,000 men employed for nearly twenty years upon one of the pyramids.
The largest pyramid was built by Cheops or Suphis, the next largest by Cephrēnês or Sen-Suphis, and the third by Menchērês, last king of the Fourth Egyptian dynasty, said to have lived before the birth of Abraham.
The Third Pyramid. Another tradition is that the third pyramid was built by Rhodŏpis or Rhodopê, the Greek courtezan. Rhodopis means the “rosy-cheeked.”
The Rhodopê that built the pyramid.
Tennyson, The Princess, ii. (1830).
Pyr´amos (in Latin Pyrămus), the lover of Thisbê. Supposing Thisbê had been torn to pieces by a lion, Pyramos stabs himself in his unutterable grief “under a mulberry tree.” Here Thisbê finds the dead body of her lover, and kills herself for grief on the same spot. Ever since then the juice of this fruit has been blood-stained.—Greek Mythology.