low the oars and the rushing
water played their music. At last the admiral relaxed his hand on Glaucon.

"_Eu!_ They will call me 'Saviour of Hellas' if all goes well. I shall be
greater than Solon, or Lycurgus, or Periander, and in return I must do
justice to a friend. Fair recompense!"

The laugh of the son of Neocles was harsher than a cry. The other answered
nothing. Themistocles set his foot on the ladder.

"I must return to the men. I would go to an oar, only they will not let
me."

The admiral left Glaucon for a moment alone. All around him was the
night,--the stars, the black aether, the blacker sea,--but he was not lonely.
He felt as when in the foot-race he turned for the last burst toward the
goal. One more struggle, one supreme summons of strength and will, and
after that the triumph and the rest.--Hellas, Athens, Hermione, he was
speeding back to all. Once again all the things past floated out of the
dream-world and before him,--the wreck, the lotus-eating at Sardis,
Thermopylae, Salamis, the agony on the _Bozra_. Now came the end, the end
promised in the moment of vision whilst he pulled the boat at Salamis.
What was it? He tried not to ask. Enough it was to be the end. He, like
Themistocles, had supreme confidence that the treason would be thwarted.
The gods were cruel, but not so cruel that after so many deliverances they
would crush him at the last. "The miracles of Zeus are never wrought in
vain." Had not Zeus wrought miracles for him once and twice? The proverb
was great comfort.

Suddenly whilst he built his palace of phantasy, a cry from the foreship
dissolved it.

"Attica, Attica, hail, all hail!"

He saw upon the sky-line the dim tracery of the Athenian headlands "like a
shield laid on the misty deep." Again men were springing from the oars,
laughing, weeping, embracing, whilst under the clear, unflagging wind the
_Nausicaae_ sped up the narrowing strait betwixt Euboea and the mainland.
Dawn glowed at last, unveiling the brown Attic shoreline with Pentelicus
the marble-fretted and all his darker peers.

Hour by hour they ran onward. They skirted the long low coast of Euboea to
the starboard. They saw Marathon and its plain of fair memories stretching
to port, and now the strait grew closer yet, and it needed all the
governor's skill at the steering-oars to keep the _Nausicaae_ from the
threatening rocks. Marathon was behind at last. The trireme rounded the
last promontory; the bay grew wi