Now, it happened, curiously enough, that, just as the servant was bringing the pomegranate into the back door of the palace, our friend Quicksilver had gone up the front steps, on his errand to get Proserpina away from King Pluto.
As soon as Proserpina saw the pomegranate on the golden salver, she told the servant he had better take it away again.
"If I were ever so hungry, I should never think of eating such a miserable, dry pomegranate as that."
He set down the golden salver, with the wizened pomegranate upon it, and left the room.
So she took up the pomegranate, and applied it to her nose; and, somehow or other, being in such close neighborhood to her mouth, the fruit found its way into that little red cave.
Now, although you may not have supposed it, Proserpina found it impossible to take leave of poor King Pluto without some regrets, and a good deal of compunction for not telling him about the pomegranate. She even shed a tear or two, thinking how lonely and cheerless the great palace would seem to him, with all its ugly glare of artificial light, after she herself--his one little ray of natural sunshine, whom he had stolen, to be sure, but only because he valued her so much--after she should have departed.
This would not have happened if I had only noticed the last
pomegranate seed and eaten it like the rest.
She then had recourse to the golden
pomegranate, and on opening it found that all the seeds were as many little violins which flew up in the vaulted roof and at once began playing melodiously.
When luck-bringing Hermes came, swift messenger from my father the Son of Cronos and the other Sons of Heaven, bidding me come back from Erebus that you might see me with your eyes and so cease from your anger and fearful wrath against the gods, I sprang up at once for joy; but he secretly put in my mouth sweet food, a
pomegranate seed, and forced me to taste against my will.
His hair is brown and crisp, and his lips are red as a
pomegranate, and he has large and dreamy eyes.
Orange,
pomegranate, and fig trees bent beneath the weight of their golden or purple fruits.
They have in the greatest plenty raisins, peaches, sour
pomegranates, and sugarcanes, and some figs.
These almost impenetrable forests were composed of
pomegranates, orange-trees, citrons, figs, olives, apricots, bananas, huge vines, whose blossoms and fruits rivaled each other in color and perfume.
He possessed a gorgeous cope of crimson silk and gold-thread damask, figured with a repeating pattern of golden
pomegranates set in six-petalled formal blossoms, beyond which on either side was the pine-apple device wrought in seed-pearls.
It is full of beautiful trees--pears,
pomegranates, and the most delicious apples.
