Lives of Alcyone

elow, unless a eat force was brought against them and an
elaborate plan was made to close beforehand all means of escape.
They had books, but not many of them; there was much recitation of
bardic poems and much telling of legends, of which Alcyone’ s
mother, Herakles, had a wonderful collection—enough to make a
modern folk-lorist green with envy. The people believed in nature-
spirits, and there were among them many who had seen them.
The conditions in some ways rather resembled those of which
we hear in mediaeval England; all the weaving and spinning were
done at home, and there seems to have been an immense amount
of house and farm work. The housewives kept great stores of linen
and herbs. The men seem mostly to have lived on horseback, using
a kind of surefooted mountain pony, which looked somewhat mule-
like. Many of these valleys were loosely joined under a chieftain, and
some of these chieftains paid, as we have said, a nominal tribute to
the Toltecs, though most of them were independent, and among
these lost was the King to which this valley belonged. The Toltecs
periodically attacked them, but rarely with success, because of the
configuration of the country. Apart from the occasional menace of
such attacks they lived peacefully and happily enough, with their
harvest festivals and their festivals at the time of sowing the seed, at
both of which races and athletic sports were prominent. These
festivals were the great occasions of meeting between the people of
the different valleys; and Neptune’ s men especially exchanged
amenities with their nearest neighbours, the vassals of his brothers
Naga and Yajna, who divided between them the next valley on one
side, and those of Ivy, who dwelt in a little isolated basin far up the
hills on the other. Their society was necessarily limited, but