METAMORPHOSES BOOK II
the last embrace, and performs all the fit offices unfitly for the dead. But that his own son should perish in the same funeral fires he cannot brook. He snatched the unborn child from his mother's womb and from the devouring flames, and bore him for safe keeping to the cave of two-formed Chiron. But the raven, which had hoped only for reward from his truth-telling, he forbad to take their place among white birds.
Meantime the Centaur was rejoicing in his foster- child of heavenly stock, glad at the honour which the task brought with it, when lo! there comes his daughter, her shoulders overmantled with red-gold locks, whom once the nymph, Chariclo, bearing her to him upon the banks of the swift stream, had called thereafter Ocyrhoë. She was not satisfied to have learnt her father's art, but she sang prophecy. So when she felt in her soul the prophetic madness, and was warmed by the divine fire prisoned in her breast, she looked upon the child and cried: "O child, health-bringer to the whole world, speed thy growth. Often shall mortal bodies owe their lives to thee, and to thee shall it be counted right to restore the spirits of the departed. But having dared his once in scorn of the gods, from power to give life a second time thou shalt be stayed by thy grandsire's lightning. So, from a god shalt thou become but a lifeless corpse; but from this corpse shalt thou again become a god and twice renew thy fates. Thou also, dear father, who art now im- mortal and destined by the law of thy birth to last through all the ages, shalt some day long for power to die, when thou shalt be in agony with all thy limbs burning with the fatal Hydra's blood. But at last, from immortal the gods shall make thee capable
