IV.—THE NARCISSUS.
This story has nothing to do with Apollo: but I may as well tell it among the other flower stories.
There was a very beautiful nymph named Echo, who had never, in all her life, seen anybody handsomer than the god Pan. You have read that Pan was the chief of all the Satyrs, and what hideous monsters the Satyrs were. So, when Pan made love to her, she very naturally kept him at a distance: and, as she supposed him to be no worse-looking than the rest of the world, she made up her mind to have nothing to do with love or love-making, and was quite content to ramble about the woods all alone.
But one day, to her surprise, she happened to meet with a young man who was as different from Pan as any creature could be. Instead of having a goat’s legs and long hairy arms, he was as graceful as Apollo himself: no horns grew out of his forehead, and his ears were not long, pointed, and covered with hair, but just like Echo’s own. And he was just as beautiful in face as he was graceful in form. I doubt if Echo would have thought even Apollo himself so beautiful.
The nymphs were rather shy, and Echo was the very shyest of them all. But she admired him so much that she could not leave the spot, and at last she even plucked up courage enough to ask him, “What is the name of the most beautiful being in the whole world?”
“Whom do you mean?” asked he. “Yourself? If you want to know your own name, you can tell it better than I can.”
“No,” said Echo, “I don’t mean myself, I mean you. What is your name?”
“My name is Narcissus,” said he. “But as for my being beautiful—that is absurd.”
“Narcissus!” repeated Echo to herself. “It is a beautiful name. Which of the nymphs have you come to meet here in these woods all alone? She is lucky—whoever she may be.”
“I have come to meet nobody,” said Narcissus. “But—am I really so beautiful? I have often been told so by other girls, of course; but really it is more than I can quite believe.”