d even
Diomede shuddered when Hector came on, and charged at Ulysses, who was
slaying Trojans as he went, and the battle swayed this way and that, and
the arrows fell like rain.

But Hector was sent into the city to bid the women pray to the goddess
Athene for help, and he went to the house of Paris, whom Helen was
imploring to go and fight like a man, saying: "Would that the winds had
wafted me away, and the tides drowned me, shameless that I am, before
these things came to pass!"

Then Hector went to see his dear wife, Andromache, whose father had been
slain by Achilles early in the siege, and he found her and her nurse
carrying her little boy, Hector's son, and like a star upon her bosom lay
his beautiful and shining golden head. Now, while Helen urged Paris to
go into the fight, Andromache prayed Hector to stay with her in the town,
and fight no more lest he should be slain and leave her a widow, and the
boy an orphan, with none to protect him. The army she said, should come
back within the walls, where they had so long been safe, not fight in the
open plain. But Hector answered that he would never shrink from battle,
"yet I know this in my heart, the day shall come for holy Troy to be laid
low, and Priam and the people of Priam. But this and my own death do not
trouble me so much as the thought of you, when you shall be carried as a
slave to Greece, to spin at another woman's bidding, and bear water from
a Grecian well. May the heaped up earth of my tomb cover me ere I hear
thy cries and the tale of thy captivity."

Then Hector stretched out his hands to his little boy, but the child was
afraid when he saw the great glittering helmet of his father and the
nodding horsehair crest. So Hector laid his helmet on the ground and
dandled the child in his arms, and tried to comfort his wife, and said
good-bye for the last time, for he never came back to Troy alive. He
went on his way back to the battle, and Paris went with him, in glorious
armour, and soon they were slaying the princes of the Greeks.

The battle raged till nightfall, and in the night the Greeks and Trojans
burned their dead; and the Greeks made a trench and wall round their
camp, which they needed for safety now that the Trojans came from their
town and fought in the open plain.

Next day the Trojans were so successful that they did not retreat behind
their walls at night, but lit great fires on the plain: a thousand fires,
with fifty men takin