Page:Eclogues and Georgics (Mackail 1910).djvu/117

ll. 237–291.] reed, calling with uninvited urgence the tired creatures to their familiar food. It will be well to mingle withal juice of pounded galls, and dry rose leaves, or wine boiled thick over a strong fire, or raisin-clusters from the Psithian vine, and Attic thyme and strong-smelling centaury. Likewise there is a meadow-flower named amellus by husbandmen, a plant easily found by the seeker, for it lifts from a single stalk a dense growth of shoots; golden the flower, but the petals that cluster thickly round it are dark violet shot with crimson; often the gods' altars are decked with its woven wreaths; it tastes bitter in the mouth; shepherds gather it in the cropped valley grass and beside the winding streams of Mella. Boil the roots of this in fragrant wine and set it in basketfuls for food by the doorway.

But for one whom the whole breed shall fail of a sudden, and he have nothing left to renew the race in a fresh family, it is time to unfold further the famed invention of the Arcadian keeper, and in what wise often ere now bees have been born from the putrefying blood of a slain bullock. More fully will I discover all the tale and trace it from its earliest source. For where the favoured race of Macedonian Canopus dwell by the still broad overflow of Nile and ride round their own farms in painted boats, and where the quivered Persian land presses nigh and the rushing river that pours straight down from the swarthy Indians parts into seven separate mouths [and enriches green Egypt with its dark sand], all the