interest, he stayed awhile. He explored the country thereabouts, he
measured the important buildings, he talked with the people who knew most
about the place. Then, when he came to write of its history, he did not
write like a man who had read an article or two in an encyclopædia and was
trying to recite what he had learned, but like one who knew the place
which he was describing and liked to talk about it, and about what had
happened there. It is no wonder that his history has always been a
favorite; and to be a favorite author for twenty centuries is no small
glory.

Ovid was a Latin poet who knew how to tell a story. He could not only
invent a tale, but he could tell it so well that the reader feels as if it
must be true. His most interesting stories, however, he did not invent,
for they are a rewriting of the old mythological tales. In one respect he
is like Homer; he never forgets the little things, and he tells so many
details that we can hardly believe he is imagining them. In his story of
Baucis and Philemon, for instance, Ovid does not forget to say that the
cottage door was so low that the two gods had to stoop to pass through it;
that Baucis hurried to brighten the fire with dry leaves and bits of bark;
that one leg of the table was too short and had to be propped up with a
piece of tile. He tells us that the kindhearted couple tried to catch
their one goose so as to cook it for the supper of their guests; but that
they were so old, and the goose so nimble of wing, that he escaped them
and flew to the Gods for refuge. We are so accustomed to think of Latin as
a grave, dignified language that almost every line of Ovid's
"Metamorphoses" is a pleasant surprise. The stories that he tells, "The
Miraculous Pitcher", "The Golden Touch", "The Pomegranate Seeds", and
others, retold by Hawthorne, are favorites among the boys and girls of
to-day, and they must have been liked just as well by the Roman children.
In Rome the children read the great poets in school, and I fancy that they