dventure. A little
south of the place where his army was to cross, there lay, on the
Asiatic shore, an extended plain, on which were the ruins of Troy. Now
Troy was the city which was the scene of Homer's poems--those poems
which had excited so much interest in the mind of Alexander in his
early years; and he determined, instead of crossing the Hellespont
with the main body of his army, to proceed southward in a single
galley, and land, himself, on the Asiatic shore, on the very spot
which the romantic imagination of his youth had dwelt upon so often
and so long.

[Illustration: THE PLAIN OF TROY.]

Troy was situated upon a plain. Homer describes an island off the
coast, named Tenedos, and a mountain near called Mount Ida. There was
also a river called the Scamander. The island, the mountain, and the
river remain, preserving their original names to the present day,
except that the river is now called the Mender, but, although various
vestiges of ancient ruins are found scattered about the plain, no spot
can be identified as the site of the city. Some scholars have
maintained that there probably never was such a city; that Homer
invented the whole, there being nothing real in all that he describes
except the river, the mountain, and the island. His story is, however,
that there was a great and powerful city there, with a kingdom
attached to it, and that this city was besieged by the Greeks for ten
years, at the end of which time it was taken and destroyed.

The story of the origin of this war is substantially this. Priam was
king of Troy. His wife, a short time before her son was born, dreamed
that at his birth the child turned into a torch and set the palace on
fire. She told this dream to the soothsayers, and asked them what it
meant. They said it must mean that her son would be the means of
bringing some terrible calamities and disasters upon the family. The
mother was terrified, and, to avert these calamities, gave the child
to a slave as soon as it was born, and ordered him to destroy it. The
slave pitied the helpless babe, and, not liking to destroy it with his
own hand, carried it to Mount Ida, and left it there in the forests to
die.

A she bear, roaming through the woods, found the child, and,
experiencing a feeling of maternal tenderness for it, she took care of
it, and reared it as if it had been her own offspring. The child was
found, at last, by some shepherds who lived upon the mountain, and
they adop