Page:La Fontaine - The Original Fables Of, 1913.djvu/73

Rh intervene between your wrath and the storm which may follow!

Mercury, light of wing and sweet of tongue, descended to the abode of the dread sisters Tisiphone,  Megæra, and Alecto, and his choice fell upon the latter,  the pitiless one. She, feeling proud of the preference, grew so arrogant as to swear by Pluto that the whole  of the human brood should soon people his domains. But Jupiter did not approve of the vow this member of the Eumenides had sworn, and he sent her back to  Hades. At the same time he launched a thunderbolt upon one particularly perfidious race of men. This, however, being hurled by a father's arm, mercifully  fell in a desert, causing less ruin than alarm. What followed from this was simply that the wicked brood  took heart at such indulgence and did not trouble to  mend their ways. Then all the gods in Olympus complained, until he who controls the clouds swore by  the Styx that further storms should be sent and that  they should not fail as the other had.

The Olympians only smiled at this. They told Jupiter that as he was the father it would be better if he left in other hands the making of thunderbolts. Vulcan undertook the task. Soon his furnaces glowed with bolts of two kinds; one that hits its mark with a deadly unerring—and that is the sort which any of the Olympian gods will hurl; whilst the other sort was that which becomes scattered on its course and does damage only to the mountain tops, or perchance is even lost on the way. It is this kind of thunderbolt that Jupiter sends. His fatherly heart permits him to use no other.