Persons who happened to be passing through the forest must have been
affrighted to see him smite the trees with his great club. With but a
single blow, the trunk was riven as by the stroke of lightning, and the
broad boughs came rustling and crashing down.

Hastening forward, without ever pausing or looking behind, he by and by
heard the sea roaring at a distance. At this sound, he increased his
speed, and soon came to a beach, where the great surf-waves tumbled
themselves upon the hard sand, in a long line of snowy foam. At one end
of the beach, however, there was a pleasant spot, where some green
shrubbery clambered up a cliff, making its rocky face look soft and
beautiful. A carpet of verdant grass, largely intermixed with sweet-
smelling clover, covered the narrow space between the bottom of the
cliff and the sea. And what should Hercules espy there, but an old man,
fast asleep!

But was it really and truly an old man? Certainly, at first sight, it
looked very like one; but, on closer inspection, it rather seemed to be
some kind of a creature that lived in the sea. For, on his legs and
arms there were scales, such as fishes have; he was web-footed and web-
fingered, after the fashion of a duck; and his long beard, being of a
greenish tinge, had more the appearance of a tuft of sea-weed than of an
ordinary beard. Have you never seen a stick of timber, that has been
long tossed about by the waves, and has got all overgrown with
barnacles, and, at last drifting ashore, seems to have been thrown up
from the very deepest bottom of the sea? Well, the old man would have
put you in mind of just such a wave-tost spar! But Hercules, the
instant he set eyes on this strange figure, was convinced that it could
be no other than the Old One, who was to direct him on his way.