y the courtesy of thy heart and thy gentle words. Ah! woe for
thee, and woe for me, whom all men shudder at, for there is now none in
wide Troyland to be my friend like thee, my brother and my friend!'

So Helen lamented, but now was done all that men might do; a great pile
of wood was raised, and Hector was burned, and his ashes were placed in
a golden urn, in a dark chamber of stone, within a hollow hill.

IX

HOW ULYSSES STOLE THE LUCK OF TROY

After Hector was buried, the siege went on slowly, as it had done during
the first nine years of the war. The Greeks did not know at that time
how to besiege a city, as we saw, by way of digging trenches and
building towers, and battering the walls with machines that threw heavy
stones. The Trojans had lost courage, and dared not go into the open
plain, and they were waiting for the coming up of new armies of
allies--the Amazons, who were girl warriors from far away, and an
Eastern people called the Khita, whose king was Memnon, the son of the
Bright Dawn.

Now everyone knew that, in the temple of the Goddess Pallas Athene, in
Troy, was a sacred image, which fell from heaven, called the Palladium,
and this very ancient image was the Luck of Troy. While it remained safe
in the temple people believed that Troy could never be taken, but as it
was in a guarded temple in the middle of the town, and was watched by
priestesses day and night, it seemed impossible that the Greeks should
ever enter the city secretly and steal the Luck away.

As Ulysses was the grandson of Autolycus, the Master Thief, he often
wished that the old man was with the Greeks, for if there was a thing to
steal Autolycus could steal it. But by this time Autolycus was dead, and
so Ulysses could only puzzle over the way to steal the Luck of Troy, and
wonder how his grandfather would have set about it. He prayed for help
secretly to Hermes, the God of Thieves, when he sacrificed goats to him,
and at last he had a plan.

There was a story that Anius, the King of the Isle of Delos, had three
daughters, named Oeno, Spermo, and Elais, and that Oeno could turn
water into wine, while Spermo could turn stones into bread, and Elais
could change mud into olive oil. Those fairy gifts, people said, were
given to the maidens by the Wine God, Dionysus, and by the Goddess of
Corn, Demeter. Now corn, and wine, and oil were sorely needed by the
Greeks, who were tired of paying much gold and bronze to the Phoenician