place for me here, and must I again
sleep in the stranger's bed?'

Said Penelope, 'In no stranger's bed wilt thou lie, my lord. Come,
Eurycleia. Set up for him his own bedstead outside his bed-chamber.'

Then Odysseus said to her, speaking in anger: 'How comes it that my bed
can be moved to this place and that? Not a bed of that kind was the bed
I built for myself. Knowest thou not how I built my bed? First, there
grew up in the courtyard an olive tree. Round that olive tree I built a
chamber, and I roofed it well and I set doors to it. Then I sheared off
all the light wood on the growing olive tree, and I rough-hewed the
trunk with the adze, and I made the tree into a bed post. Beginning with
this bed post I wrought a bedstead, and when I finished it, I inlaid it
with silver and ivory. Such was the bed I built for myself, and such a
bed could not be moved to this place or that.'

Then did Penelope know assuredly that the man who stood before her was
indeed her husband, the steadfast Odysseus--none other knew of where the
bed was placed, and how it had been built. Penelope fell a-weeping and
she put her arms round his neck.

'O Odysseus, my lord,' she said, 'be not angry with thy wife. Always the
fear was in my heart that some guileful stranger should come here
professing to be Odysseus, and that I should take him to me as my
husband. How terrible such a thing would be! But now my heart is freed
from all doubts. Be not angry with me, Odysseus, for not throwing myself
on thy neck, as the women of the house did.'

Then husband and wife wept together, and Penelope said, 'It was the gods
did this to us, Odysseus--the gods who grudged that we should have joy
of the days of our youth.'

Next they told each other of things that happened in the twenty years
they were apart; Odysseus speaking of his own toils and sorrows, and
Penelope telling what she had endured at the hands of the wooers. And as
they told tales, one to the other, slumber came upon them, and the dawn
found them sleeping side by side.

XVII

And still many dangers had to be faced. The wooers whom Odysseus had
slain were the richest and the most powerful of the lords of Ithaka and
the Islands; all of them had fathers and brothers who would fain avenge
them upon their slayer.

Now before anyone in the City knew that he had returned, Odysseus went
forth to the farm that Laertes, his old father, stayed at. As he drew
near he saw an old man workin