iron, and how to melt the ore, and how to hammer it into shape and
fashion from it the tools and weapons which they needed in peace and
war; and when he saw how happy the world was becoming he cried out:

"A new Golden Age shall come, brighter and better by far than the old!"




II. HOW DISEASES AND CARES CAME AMONG MEN.


Things might have gone on very happily indeed, and the Golden Age might
really have come again, had it not been for Jupiter. But one day, when
he chanced to look down upon the earth, he saw the fires burning, and
the people living in houses, and the flocks feeding on the hills, and
the grain ripening in the fields, and this made him very angry.

"Who has done all this?" he asked.

And some one answered, "Prometheus!"

"What! that young Titan!" he cried. "Well, I will punish him in a way
that will make him wish I had shut him up in the prison-house with his
kinsfolk. But as for those puny men, let them keep their fire. I will
make them ten times more miserable than they were before they had it."

Of course it would be easy enough to deal with Prometheus at any time,
and so Jupiter was in no great haste about it. He made up his mind to
distress mankind first; and he thought of a plan for doing it in a very