presides over the pleasant, significant details of the farm, the
threshing-floor, and the full granary, and stands beside the
woman baking bread at the oven. With these fancies are connected
certain simple rites, the half-understood local observance and
the half-believed local legend reacting capriciously on each
other. They leave her a fragment of bread and a morsel of meat at
the crossroads to take on her journey; and perhaps some real
Demeter carries them away, as she wanders through the country.
The incidents of their yearly labour become to them acts of
worship; they seek her blessing through many expressive names,
and almost catch sight of her at dawn or evening, in the nooks of
the fragrant fields. She lays a finger on the grass at the
roadside, and some new flower comes up. All the picturesque
implements of country life are hers; the poppy also, emblem of an
exhaustless fertility, and full of mysterious juices for the
alleviation of pain. The country-woman who puts her child to
sleep in the great, cradle-like basket for winnowing the corn
remembers Demeter _Kourotrophos_, the mother of corn and
children alike, and makes it a little coat out of the dress worn
by its father at his initiation into her mysteries.... She lies
on the ground out-of-doors on summer nights, and becomes wet with
the dew. She grows young again every spring, yet is of great age,
the wrinkled woman of the Homeric hymn, who becomes the nurse of
Demophoon."

This bit of description moves with so light a foot that one forgets,
as true art always makes one forget, the mass of hard and scattered
materials which lie back of it, materials which would not have yielded
their secret of unity and vitality save to imagination and sympathy;
to knowledge which has ripened into culture. But the recovery of such