e should be too much of the dragon's tooth in
his children's disposition, used to find time from his kingly duties
to teach them their A B C--which he invented for their benefit, and for
which many little people, I am afraid, are not half so grateful to him
as they ought to be.

CIRCE'S PALACE.

Some of you have heard, no doubt, of the wise King Ulysses, and how he
went to the siege of Troy, and how, after that famous city was taken and
burned, he spent ten long years in trying to get back again to his
own little kingdom of Ithaca. At one time in the course of this weary
voyage, he arrived at an island that looked very green and pleasant, but
the name of which was unknown to him. For, only a little while before
he came thither, he had met with a terrible hurricane, or rather a great
many hurricanes at once, which drove his fleet of vessels into a strange
part of the sea, where neither himself nor any of his mariners had ever
sailed. This misfortune was entirely owing to the foolish curiosity of
his shipmates, who, while Ulysses lay asleep, had untied some very
bulky leathern bags, in which they supposed a valuable treasure to be
concealed. But in each of these stout bags, King Aeolus, the ruler of
the winds, had tied up a tempest, and had given it to Ulysses to keep in
order that he might be sure of a favorable passage homeward to Ithaca;
and when the strings were loosened, forth rushed the whistling blasts,
like air out of a blown bladder, whitening the sea with foam, and
scattering the vessels nobody could tell whither.

Immediately after escaping from this peril, a still greater one had
befallen him. Scudding before the hurricane, he reached a place, which,
as he afterwards found, was called Laestrygonia, where some monstrous
giants had eaten up many of his companions, and had sunk every one of
his vessels, except that in which he himself sailed, by flinging great
masses of rock at them, from the cliffs along the shore. After going
through such troubles as these, you cannot wonder that King Ulysses
was glad to moor his tempest-beaten bark in a quiet cove of the green
island, which I began with telling you about. But he had encountered so
many dangers from giants, and one-eyed Cyclops, and monsters of the sea
and land, that he could not help dreading some mischief, even in this
pleasant and seemingly solitary spot. For two days, therefore, the poor
weather-worn voyagers kept quiet, and either staid on board of