"
Then she sighed, and said, "The gods wait long; but they are just at
last. Let it be for another year. The day may come when you will be a
stronger man than lives in all Troezene."
Then she took him by the hand, and went into the temple and prayed, and
came down again with Theseus to her home.
And when a full year was past, she led Theseus up again to the temple,
and bade him lift the stone: but he could not.
Then she sighed, and said the same words again, and went down, and came
again the next year; but Theseus could not lift the stone then, nor the
year after; and he wanted to ask his mother the meaning of that stone,
and what might lie underneath it; but her face was so sad that he had
not the heart to ask.
So he said to himself, "The day shall surely come when I will lift that
stone, though no man in Troezene can." And in order to grow strong he
spent all his days in wrestling, and boxing, and hurling, and taming
horses, and hunting the boar and the bull, and coursing goats and deer
among the rocks; till upon all the mountains there was no hunter so
swift as Theseus; and he killed Phaia the wild sow of Crommyon, which
wasted all the land; till all the people said, "Surely the Gods are
with the lad.
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