At last, when nearly starved to death, he found him. “What!” said Bacchus, “are you not content yet? Do you want more gold still?”
“Gold!” cried Midas, “I hate the horrible word! I am starving. Make me the poorest man in the whole world. Silenus taught me much; but I have learned for myself that a mountain of gold is not the worth of a single drop of dew.”
“I will take back my gift, then,” said Bacchus. “But I will not give you another instead of it, because all the gods of Olympus could not give you anything better than this lesson. You may wash away your folly in the first river you come to. Good-bye—and only don’t think that gold is not a good thing because too much of it is a bad one.”
Midas ran to the banks of the river Pactolus, which ran hard by. He threw off his golden clothes, and hurried barefoot over the sands of the river—and the sand, wherever his naked feet touched it, turned to gold. He plunged into the water, and swam through to the other side. The Curse of the Golden Touch left him, and he ate and drank, and never hungered after gold again. He had learned that the best thing one can do with too much gold is to give it away as fast as one can.
The sand of the river Pactolus is said to have gold in it to this day.
PART IV.—THE CRITIC; OR, THE SECOND STORY OF MIDAS.
ONCE upon a time the god Pan fell in love with a Naiad, or water-nymph, named Syrinx. She was very beautiful, as all the nymphs were; but Pan, as you know, was very ugly—so ugly that she hated him, and was afraid of him, and would have nothing to do with him. At last, to escape from him, she turned herself into a reed.
But even then Pan did not lose his love for her. He gathered the reed, and made it into a musical instrument, which he called a Syrinx. We call it a Pan-pipe, after the name of its inventor, and because upon this pipe Pan turned into music all his sorrow for the loss of Syrinx, making her sing of the love to which she would not listen while she was alive.
I suppose that King Midas still kept up his friendship for Silenus and the satyrs, for one day he was by when Pan was playing on his pipe of reeds, and he was so delighted with the music that he cried out, “How beautiful! Apollo himself is not so great a musician as Pan!”
You remember the story of Marsyas, and how angry Apollo was when anybody’s music was put before his own? I suppose that some ill-natured satyr must have told him what King Midas had said about him and Pan. Anyway, he was very angry indeed. And Midas, the next time he looked at himself in his mirror, saw that his ears had been changed into those of an Ass.