and hatred fell from him like a garment; he laughed and jested with
the rest--with Paris of Troy, Paris of Asia, Paris of the East,
smiling on his right, and bearded Odysseus on his left. “Tell us
a tale, Odysseus,” he begged at last, “a tale of your travels and
your prowess.” And Odysseus, shaking great tones from his chest
like snowflakes in winter, told of Nausicaa, daughter of King
Alcinoüs, and the game of ball on the Phocæan shore.
“Prowess?” he ended. “There is no prowess but kindliness. Only
kindliness lives forever in the memory.”
Then Helen, smiling at them, cried: “Sing, Homer, sing, for the
moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and the time is
going by. Sing of hearth and shrine, sing of youth and age, sing of
love, sing of peace, sing of the flocks safe from harm, the plowed
earth and the groves, and the untroubled sea. Sing of the child
nestling close to his mother, and of joy, joy, joy! Sing to us of
these, old Homer.”
And Homer sang.
* * * * *
At three o’clock in the morning a Turkish torpedo-boat patrolling
in the Black Sea came upon the aviator who had destroyed the
_Sultan Omar_. He lay in the wreckage of his hydro-aeroplane. The
Turks took him unresistingly into their craft. They say that he
sang softly to himself in an obscure Grecian dialect and babbled
incessantly of Helen and the heroes who fell before Troy.
THE END
[Illustration]
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Page 46: la Toisond ’Or changed to la Toison d’Or.
Page 49: Hotel de Ville changed to Hôtel de Ville.
Inconsistent hyphenation retained as printed. A few printing
punctuation errors were corrected.
End of Project Gutenberg's Tales from a Famished Land, by Edward Eyre Hunt