“Now, Mrs Dudley, and you young ladies, we’re going to translate you part of a Greek novel to-night,” said Julian.
“A Greek novel!” said Cyril, with a touch of incredulous suspicion. “Those old creatures didn’t write novels, did they?”
“Only the best novel that ever was written, Cyril.”
“What’s it called?”
“The Odyssey.”
“Oh, what a chouse! You don’t mean to call that a novel, do you?”
“Well, let the ladies decide.”
So he read to them how Ulysses returned in the guise of a beggar, after twenty years of war and wandering to his own palace-door, and saw the haughty suitors revelling in his halls; and how, as he reached the door, Argus, the hunting-dog, now old and neglected, and full of fleas, recollected him, when all had forgotten him, and fawned upon him, and licked his hand and died; and how the suitors insulted him, and one of them threw a foot-stool at him, which by one quick move he avoided, and said nothing, and another flung a shin-bone at his head, which he caught in his hand, and said nothing, but only smiled grimly in his heart—ever so little, a grim, sardonic smile and how the old nurse recognised him by the scar of the boar’s tusk on his leg, but he quickly repressed the exclamation of wonderment which sprang to her lips; and how he sat, ragged but princely, by the fire in his hall, and the red light flickered over him, and he spake to the suitors words of solemn warning; and how, when Agelaus warned them, a strange foreboding seized their souls, and they looked at each other with great eyes, and smiled with alien lips, and burst into quenchless laughter, though their eyes were filled with tears; and how Ulysses drew his own mighty bow, which not one of them could use, and how he handled it, and twanged the string till it sang like a swallow in his ear, and sent the arrow flying with a whiz through the twelve iron rings of the line of axes; and then, lastly, how, like to a god, he leapt on his own threshold with a shout, and gathered his rags about him, and aided by the young Telemachus and the divine Swineherd, sent hurtling into the band of wine-stained rioters the swift arrows of inevitable death.
Pleased with the tale, which the girls decided, in spite of Cyril’s veto, to be a genuine novel, they asked for a new Greek romance, and Julian read to them from Herodotus about the rise and fall of empires, and “Strange stories of the deaths of kings.” One of his stories was the famous one of Croesus, and the irony of his fate, and the warning words of Solon, all of which, rendered into quaint rich English, struck Cyril so much, that, mingling up the tale with reminiscences of Longfellow’s “Blind Bartimeus,” he produced, with much modesty at the breakfast-table next morning, the following very creditable boyish imitation:—
“Speak Grecia’s wisest, thou, ’tis said,
Full deeply in Life’s page hast read,
And many a clime hath known my tread;
Tis pantoon olbiotatos?
“The monarch raised his eager eye,
Gazed on the sage exultingly,
And slow came forth the calm reply
Tellos ho Atheenaios.
“Upon his funeral pyre he lay
Crownless, his sceptre passed away,
The shade of Solon seem to say,
oudeis toon zoontoon holbios.
“How little thought that Grecian sage
Those words should live from aye to aye,
Tis pantoon olbiotatos?
Tellos ho Atheenaios,
oudeis toon zoontoon holbios.”