squabbled whether it should not rather be a deer-skin—did any one ever hear the like? And then the guests had all set to work to tell the most marvellous stories—stories which go a long way to show how little novelty there is in the inventions of superstition; of magic rings made out of gibbet-irons; of haunted houses in which ghosts appeared and showed the way to their unburied bones; of a statue which at night stepped down from its pedestal and walked about the house, and even took a bath—you might hear him splashing in the water; of a slave who, having stolen his master's goods, was every night flogged by an invisible hand—you could count the wheals upon his back in the morning; of a little bronze figure of Hippocrates, only two spans high (this is the doctor's story), who is also given to nocturnal perambulations, and, small as he is, makes a great clatter in the surgery, upsetting the pill-boxes and changing the places of the bottles, if he has not had proper honour paid to him in the way of sacrifice during the year; of a colossal figure terminating in a serpent—Eucrates has seen it himself—before whose feet the infernal regions opened. Eucrates' own wife, again, whom he had burnt and buried handsomely, with all her favourite dresses too, in order to make her as comfortable as possible in her new state of existence,[1] had appeared to him seven months afterwards—"while I was lying on my couch,
- ↑ Probably founded on the story of Melissa's complaint to her husband Periander, that she was cold in the Shades below, because her clothes had only been buried, and not burnt, with her.—Heradotus, v. 92.
