Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/176

 child,' and so saying to make show of throwing the child into the oven. He did as the old woman advised; but the Nereid saying only, 'You hound, leave my child alone,' seized it from him and disappeared. And since the other Nereids would not admit her again to their company in the cave, as being now a mother, she took up her abode in a spring close by; and there she is seen two or three times a year holding the child in her arms. 'After hearing this tale,' says the recorder of it, 'I asked the old peasant who told it me, how long ago this had happened.' He replied that he had heard it from his grandfather, and guessed it to be about a hundred and sixty years. 'My good man,' said the other, 'would not the child have grown up in all that time?' 'What do you suppose, sir?' he answered; 'are those to grow up so easily who live from a thousand to fifteen hundred years? '

How this period was computed by the Cretan peasant, or whether it was computed at all on any system known to him, is not related; but very probably the longevity of trees was the original basis of the calculation; for the peasants will often point out some old contorted olive-trunk as a thousand or more years old; I was once even taken to see a tree reputed to have been planted by Alexander the Great. But at any rate it is clear that both in ancient and in modern times the nymphs have always been believed to be subject to ultimate death, and however the tenure of life may be determined in the case of the others, the Dryads have without doubt been generally reckoned coeval with the trees that are their homes.

An exception to this rule must however be made in the case of Nereid-haunted trees which do not die a natural death, but are felled untimely. A Nymph's life is not to be cut short by a humanly-wielded axe. In the Homeric Hymn indeed, which I have quoted, we learn that men hew not such trees with steel; and the same might, I think, be said at the present day with certainty of those trees which are known to be haunted. But the unknown is ever full of risk; and the woodcutter of the North Arcadian forests, mindful of the sacrilege which he may commit and fearful of the vengeance wherewith it may be visited, takes such precautions as piety suggests. With muttered appeals to the Panagia or his own patron-saint and with much crossing of himself he fills up the, pp. 69, 70.]