as unarmed. At last he rose, muttering, and stood in the moonlight,
like a lion in some ruinous palace of forgotten kings. He was faint with
hunger and weak with long lamenting, as he stepped within his own doors.
There he paused on that high threshold of stone where once he had sat in
the disguise of a beggar, that very threshold whence, on another day, he
had shot the shafts of doom among the wooers of his wife and the wasters
of his home. But now his wife was dead: all his voyaging was ended here,
and all his wars were vain. In the white light the house of his kingship
was no more than the ghost of a home, dreadful, unfamiliar, empty
of warmth and love and light. The tables were fallen here and there
throughout the long hall; mouldering bones, from the funeral feast, and
shattered cups and dishes lay in one confusion; the ivory chairs were
broken, and on the walls the moonbeams glistened now and again from
points of steel and blades of bronze, though many swords were dark with
rust.

But there, in its gleaming case, lay one thing friendly and familiar.
There lay the Bow of Eurytus, the bow for which great Heracles had slain
his own host in his halls; the dreadful bow that no mortal man but the
Wanderer could bend. He was never used to carry this precious bow with
him on shipboard, when he went to the wars, but treasured it at home,
the memorial of a dear friend foully slain. So now, when the voices of
dog, and slave, and child, and wife were mute, there yet came out of
the stillness a word of welcome to the Wanderer. For this bow, which
had thrilled in the grip of a god, and had scattered the shafts of the
vengeance of Heracles, was wondrously made and magical. A spirit dwelt
within it which knew of things to come, which boded the battle from
afar, and therefore always before the slaying of men the bow sang
strangely through the night. The voice of it was thin and shrill, a
ringing and a singing of the string and of the bow. While the Wanderer
stood and looked on his weapon, hark! the bow began to thrill! The sound
was faint at first, a thin note, but as he listened the voice of it in
that silence grew clear, strong, angry and triumphant. In his ears and
to his heart it seemed that the wordless chant rang thus:

Keen and low
Doth the arrow sing
The Song of the Bow,
The sound of the string.
The shafts cry shrill:
Let us forth again,
Let us feed our fill
On the f