Lives of Alcyone

half, however, took advantage of her offer, and eleven large ships
were fitted out to convey them to other lands.
When the final destruction came the abbess called the nuns
together and asked Orion, who was a fine musician, to play to them,
to play as she had never played before. The nervous shrinking
woman was absolutely transfigured; an ecstasy descended upon her
and she swept the strings with a noble gesture and called forth such
a volume of sound as no harp had ever before given. So
tremendous was the power of that divine music that when the sea
rushed in and swept all the nuns to destruction not a single cry was
raised, for all were so rapt from the lower world that the passage into
the next was unnoticed.
Another of our characters, Erato, also born in a female body
among the mountains, had precisely the same experience of being
captured and enslaved in the great city. In this case, however, the
son Ursa of her owner Alastor fell in love with her and married her.
Though a self-indulgent man, no better than the rest in that dissolute
era, he was good to his young wife in a careless sort of way, and
she was grateful to him for having saved her from the ordinary lot of
the slave. When the time of the cataclysm approached, she was
warned of it by the priests of her own people, and she announced
their prophesy to her husband. He ridiculed the idea, but as many
others were escaping to them, telling her that she would come back
in a year or two and find him living just the same life under the same
conditions. She thanked him, telling he that she would come back in
a year or two and find him living just the same life under the same
conditions. She thanked him, but declined his offer, saying that if he
intended to perish along with his country she thought it her duty to