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war?"
    He tapped his fingers on his belt. "Come back later," he said, "when I have less to do. Meanwhile, we pay Minos tribute because he commands the sea. If he stopped the tin-ships we could make no bronze, and should have to make swords of stone, like the first Earth Men. As for war, he has ships enough to bring five thousand men here in a day. Remember also that he keeps the seaways clear of pirates, who would cost us more than he does."
    "A tax is all very well," I said. "But to take people, that is treating Hellenes like slaves." "All the more reason to avoid it. In Corinth and Athens, likely boys were allowed to be seen; now other kingdoms know better. To talk of a war with Crete, as if it were a cattle raid! You try my patience. Behave yourself in the mountains. And next time I send for you, wash your face."
    All this was bitter to my new-found manhood. "We ought to hide some girls too," I said. "Can we pick our own?" He gave me a hard look. "It's a young dog that barks over his bone. You have leave to go."
    It was my bitter hour, when the big lads swaggered free in Troizen, while the small and slender, bear-led by two unwilling House Barons, were led away. Even though the cripples and the sickly stayed in Troizen too, we all felt disgraced for ever. Five days we were in the mountains, sleeping in a barn, hunting and climbing and fist-fighting and coursing hares on foot, a plague to our guardians, trying to prove to ourselves we were good for something. Someone got an eye pecked by a raven, and one or two of us, as we learned later, got sons or daughters; they are wild but willing, those girls in the back hills. Then someone rode out on muleback to say the Cretans had sailed for Tiryns, and we could come home.
    Time passed, and I grew taller, but never overtook the others; and the wrestling court was a place of grief to me, for there were boys a year younger who could lift me off the ground. I no longer hoped to be seven feet tall; I wanted a foot even of six, and I was rising sixteen.
    When there was dancing, my troubles always lifted; and I came to music through the dance. I loved the winter evenings in the Hall, when the lyre was passed about, and was glad when I began to be called on for my turn. On one such evening, a guest was there, a baron from Pylos. He sang well, and in compliment gave us the tale of Pelops, the founder hero of our line. It was not the same song as the one favored in Troizen, which was of Pelops' chariot race for the hand of the Earth King's daughter; how the King speared all her suitors as their chariots turned the end stone, till the trick with the waxen linchpin threw him first. This song was about Pelops' youth: how Blue-Haired Poseidon loved him, and would warn him of the coming earthquake when he laid his ear to the ground; he was called Pelops, so said the song, from the earth-smear on his cheek.
    I kept my thoughts to myself. This, then, was where my warning came from. Not a pledge straight from the god to me, but an inborn skill, like this man's sweet voice who sang. It came to me in my mother's blood.
    Next day, still sick at heart, I went to look for my friends; but all the youths were wrestling. I stood beside the ground, seeing the white dust fly up to the poplar leaves; too proud to take a turn with the boys of my own weight, for those who were worth a match were all younger than I.
    I watched them straining and grunting, heaving each other up and tossing each other down; and a thought came to me, how easily a man is thrown if something strikes the side of his foot just when his weight is coming on it. It puts him off balance and down he goes; it had happened to me with a wayside stone. I watched the feet, and then the bodies, and thought about it.
    Just then Maleus, a great shambling youth, called out, "Come on, Theseus, give me a match!" Then he bawled with laughter; not that he hated me, it was his way. I said, "Why not?" which made him slap his knees and roar. When we were