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Europa was very frightened, and she started up from among the tulips and lilies and cried out, "Cadmus, brother Cadmus, where are you? Come and drive this bull away."
And he had good reason to be proud of them; for Cadmus grew up to be the bravest young man in the land, and Europa to be the fairest maiden that had ever been seen. But sad days came to them all at last. One morning Europa went out into a field near the seashore to pick flowers. Her father's cattle were in the field, grazing among the sweet clover.
And though Europa never came, the good Thasus had the blessings of many a poor traveller, who profited by the food and lodging which were meant for the little playmate of the king's boyhood. Telephassa and Cadmus were now pursuing their weary way, with no companion but each other. The queen leaned heavily upon her son's arm, and could walk only a few miles a day.
During all my early years our old Harvard Alma Mater sat still and lifeless as the colossi in the Egyptian desert. Then all at once, like the statue in Don Giovanni, she moved from her pedestal. The fall of that "stony foot" has effected a miracle like the harp that Orpheus played, like the teeth which Cadmus sowed.
The strangers grew very fond of Cadmus, and resolved never to leave him, but to help him build a city wherever the cow might lie down.
"This, then," said Cadmus, gazing around him, "this is to be my home." It was a fertile and lovely plain, with great trees flinging their sun-speckled shadows over it, and hills fencing it in from the rough weather. At no great distance, they beheld a river gleaming in the sunshine. A home feeling stole into the heart of poor Cadmus.
There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knowledge Gramatica parda tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred. We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power, and the like.
"Ay, ay," continued the monarch; "take them to you per aversionem, bairns the one pouch stuffed with petitions, t'other with pasquinadoes; a fine time we have on't. On my conscience, I believe the tale of Cadmus was hieroglyphical, and that the dragon's teeth whilk he sowed were the letters he invented. Ye are laughing, Baby Charles? Mind what I say.
Scarce had he done so when the clods began to move, and the points of spears to appear above the surface. Next helmets, with their nodding plumes, came up, and next, the shoulders and breasts and limbs of men with weapons, and in time a harvest of armed warriors. Cadmus, alarmed, prepared to encounter a new enemy, but one of them said to him, "Meddle not with our civil war."
King Agenor loved his little girl Europa more than his kingdom or anything else in the world, and when Cadmus came home crying and told how a white bull had carried off his sister, the King was very angry and full of grief. "You shall never see my face again," he cried, "unless you bring back my little Europa.
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