“Go you and meet them,” answered Baucis, “while I make haste within doors, and see whether we can get them anything for supper. A comfortable bowl of bread and milk would do wonders towards raising their spirits.”
Accordingly, she hastened into the cottage. Philemon, on his part, went forward, and extended his hand with so hospitable an aspect that there was no need of saying, what nevertheless he did say, in the heartiest tone imaginable,—
“Welcome, strangers! welcome!”
“Thank you!” replied the younger of the two, in a lively kind of way, notwithstanding his weariness and trouble. “This is quite another greeting than we have met with yonder, in the village. Pray, why do you live in such a bad neighborhood?”
“Ah!” observed old Philemon, with a quiet and benign smile, “Providence put me here, I hope, among other reasons, in order that I may make you what amends I can for the inhospitality of my neighbors.”
“Well said, old father!” cried the traveller, laughing; “and, if the truth must be told, my companion and myself need some amends. Those children (the little rascals!) have bespattered us finely with their mud-ball; and one of the curs has torn my cloak, which was ragged enough already. But I took him across the muzzle with my staff; and I think you may have heard him yelp, even thus far off.”
Philemon was glad to see him in such good spirits; nor, indeed, would you have fancied, by the traveller’s look and manner, that he was weary with a long day’s journey, besides being disheartened by rough treatment at the end of it. He was dressed in rather an odd way, with a sort of cap on his head, the brim of which stuck out over both ears. Though it was a summer evening, he wore a cloak, which he kept wrapt closely about him, perhaps because his under garments were shabby. Philemen perceived, too, that he had on a singular pair of shoes; but, as it was now growing dusk, and as the old man’s eyesight was none the sharpest, he could not precisely tell in what the strangeness consisted. One thing, certainly, seemed queer. The traveller was so wonderfully light and active, that it appeared as if his feet sometimes rose from the ground of their own accord, or could only be kept down by an effort.
“I used to be light-footed, in my youth,” said Philemen to the traveller. “But I always found my feet grow heavier towards nightfall.”
“There is nothing like a good staff to help one along,” answered the stranger; “and I happen to have an excellent one, as you see.”
This staff, in fact, was the oddest-looking staff that Philemon had ever beheld. It was made of olive-wood, and had something like a little pair of wings near the top. Two snakes, carved in the wood, were represented as twining themselves about the staff, and were so very skilfully executed that old Philemon (whose eyes, you know, were getting rather dim) almost thought them alive, and that he could see them wriggling and twisting.