Lives of Alcyone

Now that the tyrant was dead, his kingdom at once broke up
into its original parts, and no further attack was made upon the tribes
of the southern mountains. The new King Uranus ruled well and
wisely, for the Queen-mother Alcyone was ever at his back, thinking
always what Sirius would have done, and what Mercury would have
advised. For some considerable time they did still advise her, though
she was but half conscious of the fact; yet often it was to their
influence that she owed the wisdom of the decisions which she
made, or rather influenced the King to make.
Though she herself had now come to regard the period of her
revenge with regret and distaste, and indeed to look upon it with
wonder as a kind of obsession, the people applauded it, and
regarded it as the most splendid heroism. She was therefore greatly
reverenced and admired, and her influence was in many ways even
greater than that of the King himself. She survived her husband for
some thirty years, and eventually passed peacefully away in the
year 13,569, at the age of eighty-two, deeply loved and mourned by
the whole nation and by the many children whom she had reared so
well, except fot that one dark time when the shock of a great sorrow
had led her to deviate from the teaching of the law of love. Her son
the King survived her for some years and, remembering her
instruction, ruled well and wisely, and as the Toltec power never
regained sufficient strength to reassert itself in the southern
mountains, the dynasty which was thus founded lasted for centuries,
and her tribe flourished exceedingly.
This life was on the whole a good one, and in it considerable
progress was made, in spite of that one lapse, under terrible
provocation, into the fault which had been the dominant note of a
19