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Updated: June 9, 2025
The Law of the Forest alone restrained her from going forth in search of adventure. While this mood lay heavy upon pretty Necile it chanced that the great Ak visited the Forest of Burzee and allowed the wood-nymphs as was their wont to lie at his feet and listen to the words of wisdom that fell from his lips.
She remained there until midnight came. Suddenly the serpent-maidens from Patâla and the wood-nymphs, accompanied by a train of seven demon Asuras, came and worshipped at the altar. After making offerings to the god they called out, "Is there any uninvited guest present to whom we can make a gift?"
When lately we looked into that Red-Maple swamp all a-blaze, where the trees were clothed in their vestures of most dazzling tints, did it not suggest a thousand gypsies beneath, a race capable of wild delight, or even the fabled fawns, satyrs, and wood-nymphs come back to earth?
The three last named were immortal, but the wood-nymphs, called Dryads or Hamadryads, were believed to perish with the trees which had been their abode and with which they had come into existence. It was therefore an impious act wantonly to destroy a tree, and in some aggravated cases were severely punished, as in the instance of Erisichthon, which we are about to record.
Hortense now boldly asked his cooperation for finishing her small canvas. Though the "wood-nymphs" of last autumn's legend might indeed be, as he had broadly said, "a nice enough lot of girls," they really were not all alike and indistinguishable: one of them at least, as he should learn, had thumbs. Hortense wheeled into action.
After we had labored and floundered along for about an hour, the road turned to the left, and in a little stumpy clearing near the creek a gable uprose on our view. It did not prove to be just such a place as poets love to contemplate. It required a greater effort of the imagination than any of us were then capable of to believe it had ever been a favorite resort of wood-nymphs or sylvan deities.
For costume she adopted oak-leaf green; all the wood-nymphs dress in that color and know no other so desirable. Her dainty feet were sandal-clad, while her head remained bare of covering other than her silken tresses. Necile's duties were few and simple. She kept hurtful weeds from growing beneath her trees and sapping the earth-food required by her charges.
So the Brahman woman prayed her hardest to the sixty-four Yoginis, and then she prostrated herself before the serpent-maidens from Patâla, and the wood-nymphs, and their train of demon Asuras. And then she took the little one-year-old boy on her hip, and the newly-born baby boy in her arms, and she walked with her other five sons to the village.
Theocritus united elegance with simplicity; and taught his shepherds to sing with so much ease and harmony, that his countrymen, despairing to excel, forbore to imitate him; and the Greeks, however vain or ambitious, left him in quiet possession of the garlands which the wood-nymphs had bestowed upon him.
And the king and his companions, although weary to death, followed her. At last they came to the temple where she had worshipped, together with the serpent-maidens from Patâla and the bevy of wood-nymphs. It was a tiny temple, and inside it there was a rough altar.
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