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shepherd. I will give them justice between chief and chief, craftsman and craftsman, if they will come to me for it. I killed Prokrustes, to show I can make it good. I think they will come.”
    He nodded, thinking. He was old; but like every man good at his trade, he was ready to hear of something new.
    “Men could be more than they are,” I said. I learned that in the Bull Court, when I trained my team. There is a faith, there is a pride, which has to be acted first and grows by doing.”
    I saw his forehead wrinkle. He was trying to see me, his grandson and a king, in a life he only knew from songs and wall-pictures: a jewelled mountebank vaulting bulls before base-born crowds, eating and sleeping and training with people from everywhere, sons of hanged pirates, barbarous Scythians, wild Amazon girls taken in war. It shocked him past talking of, that I had been a slave. He was wiser than the bull-girls’ kindred, and much better; but he did not understand. There was no life like that glory in the dust.
    So I talked to him of his sons’ deeds in battle, praising the best as they deserved, for I knew he had not yet chosen out his heir. They were all sons of his Palace women; of his queen’s children only my mother had lived past childhood. As a boy, before I knew my own getting, I had thought he would choose me; but you could not expect him to leave the land to an absent lord, and I wanted him to know I had no more thought of it.
    After this I went to look for my mother. They told me she had gone to sacrifice. I asked if nobody knew where she was, for night was falling; but they said I should find her at sunup in the wood of Zeus. So I looked out a girl who showed me she had not forgotten me, and went to bed.
    At morning I went up through the hillside woods, by the path above the stream. At first the woods were open, the clearings loud with birds; then the ancient forest grew high and met above. Grass-blades were thin and pale, and wet black oak leaves lay in the falls of years, roots arched among them like stiffened serpents. I threaded the winding path that is never trodden clear but never quite grows over, till I came to the holy place where Zeus struck down the oak tree. It had spread wide, before its death, and still there was open sky there. Between its roots was the stone where my father had left his tokens for me, when I came to manhood. My mother stood beside it.
    I stepped forward smiling; then my arms fell down. She had on her priestly robes and her tall diadem worked with gold snakes; I saw she was purified for some holy rite, and not to be touched by the hand of man. Before I could speak, she motioned with her eyes. There were two priestesses standing in the grove, an old woman and a maid of thirteen or fourteen years. They had a covered basket such as sacred things are carried in; the crone was whispering to the maiden, who stared past her with great eyes at me.
    My mother said, “Come, Theseus. This place belongs to Zeus, and is for men: we must go to another shrine.”
    She turned towards a path that ran deep into the thicket. A night-bird’s feather seemed to brush me coldly. I said, “What is it, Mother?” although I knew. She answered, “This is not the place to speak in. Come.”
    I followed her into the green shades; out of sight behind I heard the old woman and the girl murmuring, or stepping on twigs and leaves. Presently we came to a tall gray rock. There was a carving on it, old and worn, of a great open eye. I stood still, knowing that this was a place of the Goddess, forbidden to men. The path bent round beyond; but I turned my eyes from it and waited. The priestesses had sat down, just out of hearing, on a mossy stone. Even now my mother did not speak.
    “Mother,” I said, “why are you bringing me before Her? Have I not toiled in Her lands and suffered, and lived with my life on my fingers’ ends? Is it not enough?”
    “Hush,” she said. “You know what you have done.” She