Chapter 6

Chapter VI
Vertumnus and Pomona. Cupid and Psyche The Hamadryads were Wood-nymphs. Among them was Pomona, and no
one excelled her in love of the garden and the culture of fruit.
She cared not for forests and rivers, but loved the cultivated
country and trees that bear delicious apples. Her right hand
bore for its weapon not a javelin, but a pruning knife. Armed
with this, she worked at one time, to repress the too luxuriant
growths, and curtail the branches that straggled out of place; at
another, to split the twig and insert therein a graft, making the
branch adopt a nursling not its own. She took care, too, that
her favorites should not suffer from drought, and led streams of
water by them that the thirsty roots might drink. This
occupation was her pursuit, her passion; and she was free from
that which Venus inspires. She was not without fear of the
country people, and kept her orchard locked, and allowed not men
to enter. The Fauns and Satyrs would have given all they
possessed to win her, and so would old Sylvanus, who looks young
for his years, and Pan, who wears a garland of pine leaves around
his head. But Vertumnus loved her best of all; yet he sped no
better than the rest. Oh, how often, in the disguise of a
reaper, did he bring her corn in a basket, and looked the very
image of a reaper! With a hay-band tied round him, one would
think he had just come from turning over the grass. Sometimes he
would have an ox-goad in his hand, and you would have said he had
just unyoked his weary oxen. Now he bore a pruning-hook, and
personated a vine-dresser; and again with a ladder on his
shoulder, he seemed as if he was going to gather apples.
Sometimes he trudged along as a discharged soldier, and again he
bore a fishing-rod as if going to fish. In this way, he gained
admission to her, again and again, and fed his passion with the
sight of her. One day he came in the guise of an old woman, her gray hair
surmounted with a cap, and a staff in her hand. She entered the
garden and admired the fruit. "It does you credit, my dear," she
said, and kissed Pomona, not exactly with an old woman's kiss.
She sat down on a bank, and looked up at the branches laden with
fruit which hung over her. Opposite was an elm entwined with a
vine loaded with swelling grapes. She praised the tree and its
associated vine, equally. "But," said Vertumnus, "if the tree
stood alone, and had no vine clinging to it, it would lie
prostrate on the ground. Why will you not take a lesson from the
tree and the vine, and consent to unite yourself with some one?
I wish you would. Helen herself had not more numerous suitors,
nor Penelope, the wife of shrewd Ulysses. Even while you spurn
them, they court you rural deities and others