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wind, or groundless fright could have availed to cause his death! Nor you would I accuse in my stricken grief; unalterable and sure came this curse upon the mother, at this nurse’s hands. Yet her didst thou favour more, my son, her only didst thou know and heard when she called thee; me thou knewest not, no joy had thy mother of thee. But she, the fiend! she heard thy cries and thy laughter mixt with tears, and caught the accents of thy earliest speech. She was ever thy mother, while life remained to thee, I only now. But woe is me! that I cannot punish her for her crime! Why bring ye these gifts, ye chieftains, to the pyre, why these empty rites? Herself, I beg—no more does his shade demand—herself, I pray you, offer, both to the dead and to the ruined parent, I beseech you by this first bloodshed of the war, for which I bore him; so may the Ogyian mothers have deaths to mourn as sad as mine!” She tears her hair and repeats her supplication: “Ay, give her up, nor call me cruel or greedy of blood; I will die likewise, so be it that, my eyes full-sated by her just death, we fall upon the selfsame fire.” Thus loudly crying she beheld elsewhere afar Hypsipyle lamenting—for she too spares nor hair nor bosom—and ill brooking a partner in her woe: “This at least prevent, O princes, and thou for whom the child of our own bed has been flung to ruin; remove that hated woman from the funeral rites! Why does she offend his mother with her accursed presence, and show herself