The Spartan Twins | Page 3

of all!
Run at once to the spring, Chloe. I '11 get the oven myself. Daphne,
you take the small water-jar and go with Chloe."
As Chloe and Daphne, with their water-jars on their shoulders, started
out of the back door for the spring, the door at the front of the court

opened, and Melas entered with a tall, bearded man wearing a long
cloak.
The moment she heard the door move on its hinges, Lydia stood up
straight and tall beside her hearth-fire, and, at a sign from her husband,
came forward to greet the Stranger.
"You are welcome," she said, "to such entertainment as our plain house
affords. I could wish it were better for your sake."
"I shall be honored by your hospitality," said the Stranger politely, "and
what is good enough for a farmer is surely good enough for a
philosopher, if I may call myself one."
"Though you are a philosopher, you are also, no doubt, an Athenian,"
replied Lydia, "and it is known to all the world that the feast of the
Spartan is but common fare for those who live delicately as the
Athenians do."
"I bring an appetite that would make a feast of bread alone," answered
the Stranger.
Melas, a tall brown-faced man with a brown beard, now spoke for the
first time.
"There is no haste, wife," he said. "The Stranger will spend the night
under our roof. It is not yet late. While you get supper, we will rest
beneath the olive trees and watch the sun go down behind the hills."
"Until I can better serve you, then," Lydia replied; and the two men
went out again through the open door, and sat down upon a wooden
bench which commanded a view of the little valley and the hills
beyond.
Meanwhile, within doors, Lydia dropped the stately dignity of her
company manners and became once more the busy housewife. When
Chloe and Daphne returned from the spring, she had barley-cakes
baking in the oven, and sausages were roasting before the hearth-fire. A

kettle of broth steamed beside it.
"How good it smells!" cried Dion, when he came in with Argos from
the farm-yard. "I could eat a whole pig myself. Do cook a lot of
sausages, Mother. I am as hungry as a wolf."
"And you a Spartan boy!" said his Mother reprovingly. "You should
think less of what you put in your stomach! Plain fare makes the
strongest men. It is only polite to give a guest the best you have, but
that's no excuse for being greedy and wanting to stuff yourself every
day."
"Well, then," said Dion, "I wish Hermes, if he is the god who guides
travelers, would bring them this way oftener. I'd like to be a strong man,
but I like good things to eat, too, and when we have company, we have
a feast."
His Mother did not answer him; she was too busy.
She sent Chloe to the closet for a jar of wine, and some goat's-milk
cheese, and she herself went upstairs to get some dried figs from the
store-room. Daphne followed Chloe to the closet, and for a moment
there was no one beside the hearth-fire but Dion and Argos, and the
sausages smelled very good indeed.
"I wonder if she counted them," thought Dion to himself, as he looked
longingly at them. And then almost before he knew it himself he had
snatched one of the sausages from the fire and had bitten a piece off the
end! It was so very hot that it burned both his fingers and his tongue
like everything, and when he tried to lick his fingers, he let go of the
sausage, and Argos snapped it up and swallowed it whole. It burned all
the way down to his stomach, and Argos gave a dreadful howl of pain
and dashed through the door out into the farm-yard. Dion heard his
Mother's footsteps coming down the stair. He thought perhaps he'd
better join Argos.
When Lydia reached the hearth-fire once more, only Daphne was in the
room. She set down the basket of figs and knelt to turn the sausages.

She had counted them and she saw at once that one was missing. She
was shocked and surprised, but she guessed what had become of it.
Mothers are just like that. She rose from her knees and looked around
for the culprit. She saw Daphne.
"You naughty boy!" she said sternly to Daphne. "What have you done
with that sausage?"
"I didn't do anything with it; I never even saw it," cried poor Daphne.
"And, besides that, I'm not a naughty boy. I'm not a boy at all! I'm
Daphne!"
"Where's Dion, then?" demanded Lydia.
"I don't know where he is," said Daphne. "I didn't