the king her dream; and when the child was born, they called a
soothsayer, who could foresee the mysteries of the future, and they
asked him what the vision meant.

"'It means,' said he, 'that this babe, if he lives, shall be a
firebrand in Troy, and shall turn its walls and its high towers into
heaps of smouldering ashes.'

"'But what shall be done with the child, that he may not do this
terrible thing?' asked Priam, greatly sorrowing, for the babe was very
beautiful.

"'Do not suffer that he shall live,' answered the soothsayer.

"Priam, the gentlest and most kind-hearted of men, could not bear to
harm the babe. So he called his master shepherd, and bade him take the
helpless child into the thick woods, which grow high up on the slopes
of Mount Ida, behind the city, and there to leave him alone. The wild
beasts that roam among those woods, he thought, would doubtless find
him, or, in any case, he could not live long without care and
nourishment; and thus the dangerous brand would be quenched while yet
it was scarcely a spark.

"The shepherd did as he was bidden, although it cost his heart many a
sharp pang thus to deal barbarously with the innocent. He laid the
smiling infant, wrapped in its broidered tunic, close by the foot of an
oak, and then hurried away that he might not hear its cries.

"But the nymphs who haunt the woods and groves, saw the babe, and
pitied its helplessness, and cared for it so that it did not die. Some