Then the unfaithful servants were made to purify the palace and afterwards paid with their lives for their misdeeds, while those who had been true to their lord crowded around him with joy.
Euryclea flew to summon the sleeping Penelope. She was unable to believe the glad news. "Ulysses comes! The suitors are no more!" She could not think it true. At last she stood trembling before her lord, still afraid to believe it was he, age and time seemed to have made him so strange to her eyes.
Then Minerva crowned her watchful care of the hero by restoring to him the beauty of his youth; but still the Queen hesitated. Ulysses therefore described to her the marvels of the bridal bed he had contrived for her of the huge olive tree that grew in the courtyard.
Penelope saw then that it was indeed the King, who alone could have known the secret of the bed. She fell fainting into his arms in a transport of joy, and Ulysses once more resumed his sway over the kingdom.
BAUCIS AND PHILEMON
BY H. P. MASKELL
On the slopes of the Phrygian hills there once dwelt a pious old couple named Baucis and Philemon. They had lived all their lives in a tiny cottage of wattles thatched with straw, cheerful and contented in spite of their poverty. Servants never troubled them, because they waited on themselves, and they never had to consider the whims of other people, because they were their own masters.
As this worthy old couple sat dozing by the fireside one evening in the late autumn, two strangers came and begged a shelter for the night. They had to stoop to enter the humble doorway, where the old man welcomed them heartily and bade them rest their weary limbs on the settle. Meanwhile Baucis stirred the embers, blowing them into a flame with dry leaves, and heaping on fagots and logs to boil the stewing-pot. Hanging from the blackened beams was a rusty side of bacon. Philemon cut off a rasher to roast; and while his guests refreshed themselves with a wash at the rustic trough, he gathered what pot herbs could be culled from his patch of garden. Then the old woman, her hands trembling with age, laid the cloth and spread the board. It was a rickety old table. One leg was too short, and had to be propped up with a potsherd.