and Cassandra, sad with foreknowledge of their doom, and Andromache,
the lovely young wife of Hector, with her little son whom the people
called _The City King_. Sometimes Fair Helen came to look across the
plain to the fellow-countrymen whom she had forsaken; and although she
was the cause of all this war, the Trojans half forgave her when she
passed by, because her beauty was like a spell, and warmed hard hearts
as the sunshine mellows apples. So for nine years the Greeks plundered
the neighboring towns, but the city Troy stood fast, and the Grecian
ships waited with folded wings.

The half of that story cannot be told here, but in the tenth year of
the war many things came to pass, and the end drew near. Of this tenth
year alone, there are a score of tales. For the Greeks fell to
quarrelling among themselves over the spoils of war, and the great
Achilles left the camp in anger and refused to fight. Nothing would
induce him to return, till his friend Patroclus was slain by Prince
Hector. At that news, indeed, Achilles rose in great might and returned
to the Greeks; and he went forth clad in armor that had been wrought
for him by Vulcan, at the prayer of Thetis. By the river Scamander,
near to Troy, he met and slew Hector, and afterwards dragged the hero's
body after his chariot across the plain. How the aged Priam went alone
by night to the tent of Achilles to ransom his son's body, and how
Achilles relented, and moreover granted a truce for the funeral honors
of his enemy,--all these things have been so nobly sung that they can
never be fitly spoken.

Hector, the bulwark of Troy, had fallen, and the ruin of the city was
at hand. Achilles himself did not long survive his triumph, and,
ruthless as he was, he ill-deserved the manner of his death. He was
treacherously slain by that Paris who would never have dared to meet