"Come, we must get the feast ready. Eros--Psyche--Hebe--Ganymede--all you young people can arrange the fruit."
"I don't see any fruit," said Kathleen, as four slender forms disengaged themselves from the white crowd and came toward them.
"You will though," said Eros, a really nice boy, as the girls instantly agreed; "you've only got to pick it."
"Like this," said Psyche, lifting her marble arms to a willow branch. She reached out her hand to the children--it held a ripe pomegranate.
"I see," said Mabel. "You just----" She laid her fingers to the willow branch and the firm softness of a big peach was within them.
"Yes, just that," laughed Psyche, who was a darling, as any one could see.
After this Hebe gathered a few silver baskets from a convenient alder, and the four picked fruit industriously. Meanwhile the elder statues were busy plucking golden goblets and jugs and dishes from the branches of ash-trees and young oaks and filling them with everything nice to eat and drink that any one could possibly want, and these were spread on the steps. It was a celestial picnic. Then everyone sat or lay down and the feast began. And oh! the taste of the food served on those dishes, the sweet wonder of the drink that melted from those gold cups on the white lips of the company! And the fruit--there is no fruit like it grown on earth, just as there is no laughter like the laughter of those lips, no songs like the songs that stirred the silence of that night of wonder.
"Oh!" cried Kathleen, and through her fingers the juice of her third peach fell like tears on the marble steps. "I do wish the boys were here!"
"I do wonder what they're doing," said Mabel.
[Illustration: IT WAS A CELESTIAL PICNIC.]
"At this moment," said Hermes, who had just made a wide ring of flight, as a pigeon does, and come back into the circle--"at this moment they are wandering desolately near the home of the dinosaurus, having escaped from their home by a window, in search of you. They fear that you have perished, and they would weep if they did not know that tears do not become a man, however youthful."
Kathleen stood up and brushed the crumbs of ambrosia from her marble lap.
"Thank you all very much," she said. "It was very kind of you to have us, and we've enjoyed ourselves very much, but I think we ought to go now, please."