in his degradation had not forgotten his Homer. 'That evening,'
says Schliemann, 'he recited to us about a hundred lines of the
poet, observing the rhythmic cadence of the verses. Although I
did not understand a syllable, the melodious sound of the words
made a deep impression upon me, and I wept bitter tears over my
unhappy fate. Three times over did I get him to repeat to me those
divine verses, rewarding his trouble with three glasses of whisky,
which I bought with the few pence that made up my whole wealth.
From that moment I never ceased to pray God that by His grace I
might yet have the happiness of learning Greek.'

To one whose heart was filled with such a passion for learning, no
obstacle could prove insuperable. Yet for many a day the Fates seemed
most unpropitious. Ill-health drove him to emigrate to Venezuela,
but his ship was wrecked on the Dutch coast, and he became the
errand-boy of a business house in Amsterdam. Here in his first
year of service he managed, while going on his master's errands,
to learn English in the first six months and French in the next,
and incidentally to save for intellectual purposes one half of
his salary of 800 francs. The mental training of the first year
enabled him to learn Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese with
much greater rapidity, each language being acquired in six weeks. In
1846 he was sent by another firm as their agent to St. Petersburg,
where in the next year he founded a business house of his own, and
from that time all went well with him. The Crimean War brought him
opportunities which he utilized with such ingenuity as to derive
considerable profit from them. By 1858 he considered that the fortune
he had made was sufficient to warrant him in devoting himself entirely
to archaeology, and though exceptional circumstances obliged him to
return to business for a little, he finally cut himself loose from
it in 1863, and took up the task which was to occupy the remainder
of his busy life.

[Illustration V: WALLED PASSAGE IN WALL, TIRYNS (_p_. 49)

BEEHIVE TOMB (TREASURY OF ATREUS), MYCENAE (_p_. 46)]

His Greek studies had led him to two convictions on which his whole
exploring work was based. First, that the site of ancient Troy was on
the spot called in classical days New Ilium, the Hill of Hissarlik,
near the coast of the AEgean; and second, that the Greek traveller,
Pausanias, was right in stating that the murdered Agamemnon and
his kin were buried within