Page:The Music of the Spheres.djvu/145

 courted the lovely, dark-eyed nymph Amphitrite, he came riding on the back of a dolphin. As his courtship was successful, he rewarded the dolphin in the usual way, by gaining permission to have him placed among the stars.



Sagittarius, the Archer, is supposed to be a centaur, one of a fabulous race seen on the plains of Thessaly and about the woods of Mount Pelion. This race was supposed to possess the body of a horse and the head and shoulders of a man but none of them had ever amounted to much or accomplished anything of worth in the world, with the grand exception of one centaur, whose name was Chiron. Chiron lived in a stone cave near the summit of Mount Pelion and it was here that all the heroes of Greece—Hercules, Jason, Castor and Pollux, Æsculapius, Achilles and others—spent their early lives, for Chiron was famous for his knowledge and served these young men as a tutor. He not only taught them all the manly arts but he aided them in various enterprising adventures, such as marking out the constellations for the heroes when they went with Jason in the Argo in search of the Golden Fleece.

One day Hercules unfortunately opened the fatal wine-jar, and the odor, floating about on the breezes, attracted hordes of com-