HOW MR. APOLLO TURNED ON THE LIGHT
Behold the sun-god starting on his daily round! Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn, precedes him scattering flowers, the lovely colors of the morning sky. The other figures are the early hours.
The Greek poets used to play with these myth stories a good deal, changing them to suit their poetic fancy. Theocritus, for example, in a beautiful fragment that has come down to us, paints this picture of the breaking day:
"Dawn, up from the sea to the sky,
By her fleet-footed steeds was drawn."
You see, according to this poet's conception, Miss Dawn had a chariot of her own.
But nothing serious happened until one time Phaeton persuaded father to let him drive the sun chariot for a day. The horses, feeling at once a new and weak hand on the reins, tore out of the regular road and went dashing right and left. They even got so near the North Pole that the ice began to melt. They fairly flew down toward the earth, set the mountains smoking, and dried up all the springs and most of the rivers.
THEN THINGS BEGAN TO HAPPEN
They dried up a certain great lake, so that there is to this day the Libyan Desert in Africa, where this lake used to be. They made the very sea shrink so that there were "wide naked plains where once its billows rose."