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Here with him dwells his mother, a being, as one folk-song tells[180], more pitiful than he, who entreats him sometimes, when he is setting out to the chase, to spare mothers with young children and not to part lovers new-wed. He has also a wife, Charóntissa or Chárissa, who as the name itself implies is merely a feminine counterpart of himself without any distinct character of her own. A son of Charos is also mentioned in song, for whose wedding-feast ‘he slays children instead of lambs and brides as fatlings[181],’ and to whose keeping are entrusted the counter-keys of Hades[182]. Adopted children are also counted among his family, but these are of those whom he has carried from this world to his own home[183]. The household is completed by the three-headed watch-dog, of whom however remembrance is very rare. Yet in two stories in the last section we recognised Cerberus, and even the less convincing of the embodiments there presented, that which represented him as a three-headed snake rather than dog, is not devoid of traces of ancient tradition. The hero who would slay the monster has to cross a piece of water—the sea instead of the river Styx—in order to reach an island where is the monster’s lair; and there arrived, he sees ‘looking out from a hole three heads with eyes that flash fire and jaws that breathe flames[184].’ This is Cerberus without doubt; and if the story calls him ‘serpent’ rather than ‘dog,’ ancient mythology and art alike justify in part the description; for his mother was said to be Echidna, and he himself is found pourtrayed with the tail of a serpent and a ring of snakes about his neck. Schmidt himself appears to have overlooked the testimony of this story and of that also from the collection of von Hahn in which, as I have pointed out, we have a modern picture of Cerberus guarding the realm of Persephone; for he speaks of some remarkable lines from a song which he himself heard in Zacynthos as an unique mention of Cerberus, and questions the genuine nature of the tradition. All doubt is however removed by the corroborative evidence contained in the two stories already mentioned and by the fact that a three-headed dog belonging to Charos was recently heard of by a traveller in Macedonia[185]. The lines themselves are put in the mouth of Charos:—