hand and took the bow, and tried the string, and it answered shrill as
the song of the swallow.

Then at length, when he heard the bowstring twang to his touch, the
fountains of his sorrow were unsealed; tears came like soft rains on a
frozen land, and the Wanderer wept.

When he had his fill of weeping, he rose, for hunger drove him--hunger
that is of all things the most shameless, being stronger far than
sorrow, or love, or any other desire. The Wanderer found his way through
the narrow door behind the dais, and stumbling now and again over fallen
fragments of the home which he himself had built, he went to the inner,
secret storehouse. Even _he_ could scarcely find the door, for saplings
of trees had grown up about it; yet he found it at last. Within the holy
well the water was yet babbling and shining in the moonlight over the
silver sands; and here, too, there was store of mouldering grain, for
the house had been abundantly rich when the great plague fell upon the
people while he was far away. So he found food to satisfy his hunger,
after a sort, and next he gathered together out of his treasure-chest
the beautiful golden armour of unhappy Paris, son of Priam, the false
love of fair Helen. These arms had been taken at the sack of Troy, and
had lain long in the treasury of Menelaus in Sparta; but on a day he had
given them to Odysseus, the dearest of all his guests. The Wanderer
clad himself in this golden gear, and took the sword called "Euryalus's
Gift," a bronze blade with a silver hilt, and a sheath of ivory, which
a stranger had given him in a far-off land. Already the love of life
had come back to him, now that he had eaten and drunk, and had heard the
Song of the Bow, the Slayer of Men. He lived yet, and hope lived in him
though his house was desolate, and his wedded wife was dead, and there
was none to give him tidings of his one child, Telemachus. Even so