ed and feared everything. They were in no mood even to
invoke the gods. In desperation some jested riotously as they gripped the
oars on the benches,--demonstrations which the _proreus_ quelled with a
loud "Silence in the ship." The morning mist was breaking. A brisk wind
was coming with the sun. Clear and strong sang the Notus, the breeze of
the kindly south. It covered the blue bay with crisping whitecaps, it sent
the surf foaming up along the Attic shore across the strait. Themistocles
watched it all with silent eyes, but eyes that spoke of gladness. He knew
the waves would beat with full force on the Persian prows, and make their
swift movement difficult while the Greeks, taking the galloping surf
astern, would suffer little.

"AEolus fights for us. The first omen and a fair one." The word ran in
whispers down the benches, and every soul on the trireme rejoiced.

How long did they sit thus? An aeon? Would Eurybiades never draw out his
line of battle? Would Adeimantus prove craven at the end? Would treachery
undo Hellas to-day, as once before at Lade when the Ionian Greeks had
faced the Persian fleet in vain? Now as the vapour broke, men began to be
able to look about them, and be delivered from their own thoughts. The
shores of Salamis were alive,--old men, women, little children,--the
fugitives from Attica were crowding to the marge in thousands to watch the
deed that should decide their all. And many a bronze-cheeked oarsman arose
from his bench to wave farewell to the wife or father or mother, and sank
back again,--a clutching in his throat, a mist before his eyes, while his
grip upon the oar grew like to steel.

As the _Nausicaae_ rode at her place in the long line of ships spread up
and down the shore of Salamis, it was easy to detect forms if not faces on
the strand. And Glaucon, peering out from his helmet bars, saw Democrates
himself standing on the sands and beckoning to Themistocles. Then other
figures became clear to him out of the many, this one or that whom he had
loved and clasped hands with in the sunlit days gone by. And last of all
he saw those his gaze hungered for the most, Hermippus, Lysistra, and
another standing at their side all in white, and in her arms she bore
something he knew must be her child,--Hermione's son, his son, born to the
lot of a free man of Athens or a slave of Xerxes according as his elders
played their part this day. Only a glimpse,--the throng of strangers opened
to disclo