r
his shoulder, and hid the Luck of Troy in his bosom. He washed himself
clean in a mountain brook, and now all who saw him must have known that
he was no beggar, but Ulysses of Ithaca, Laertes' son.

So he walked cautiously down the side of the brook which ran between
high banks deep in trees, and followed it till it reached the river
Xanthus, on the left of the Greek lines. Here he found Greek sentinels
set to guard the camp, who cried aloud in joy and surprise, for his
ship had not yet returned from Delos, and they could not guess how
Ulysses had come back alone across the sea. So two of the sentinels
guarded Ulysses to the hut of Agamemnon, where he and Achilles and all
the chiefs were sitting at a feast. They all leaped up, but when Ulysses
took the Luck of Troy from within his mantle, they cried that this was
the bravest deed that had been done in the war, and they sacrificed ten
oxen to Zeus.

'So you were the old beggar,' said young Thrasymedes.

'Yes,' said Ulysses, 'and when next you beat a beggar, Thrasymedes, do
not strike so hard and so long.'

That night all the Greeks were full of hope, for now they had the Luck
of Troy, but the Trojans were in despair, and guessed that the beggar
was the thief, and that Ulysses had been the beggar. The priestess,
Theano, could tell them nothing; they found her, with the extinguished
torch drooping in her hand, asleep, as she sat on the step of the altar,
and she never woke again.

X

THE BATTLES WITH THE AMAZONS AND MEMNON--THE DEATH OF ACHILLES

Ulysses thought much and often of Helen, without whose kindness he could
not have saved the Greeks by stealing the Luck of Troy. He saw that,
though she remained as beautiful as when the princes all sought her
hand, she was most unhappy, knowing herself to be the cause of so much
misery, and fearing what the future might bring. Ulysses told nobody
about the secret which she had let fall, the coming of the Amazons.

The Amazons were a race of warlike maids, who lived far away on the
banks of the river Thermodon. They had fought against Troy in former
times, and one of the great hill-graves on the plain of Troy covered the
ashes of an Amazon, swift-footed Myrine. People believed that they were
the daughters of the God of War, and they were reckoned equal in battle
to the bravest men. Their young Queen, Penthesilea, had two reasons for
coming to fight at Troy: one was her ambition to win renown, and the
other her