d, he
walked the deck till a wave stripped off all the tackling, and loosened
the sides from the keel. Ulysses had only time to lash the broken mast
with a rope to the keel, and sit on this raft with his feet in the
water, while the South Wind rose again furiously, and drove the raft
back till it came under the rock where was the whirlpool of Charybdis.
Here Ulysses would have been drowned, but he caught at the root of a fig
tree that grew on the rock, and there he hung, clinging with his toes to
the crumbling stones till the whirlpool boiled up again, and up came the
timbers. Down on the timbers Ulysses dropped, and so sat rowing with his
hands, and the wind drifted him at last to a shelving beach of an
island.

Here dwelt a kind of fairy, called Calypso, who found Ulysses nearly
dead on the beach, and was kind to him, and kept him in her cave, where
he lived for seven long years, always desiring to leave the beautiful
fairy and return to Ithaca and his wife Penelope. But no ship of men
ever came near that isle, which is the central place of all the seas,
and he had no ship, and no men to sail and row. Calypso was very kind,
and very beautiful, being the daughter of the wizard Atlas, who holds
the two pillars that keep earth and sea asunder. But Ulysses was longing
to see if it were but the smoke going up from the houses of rocky
Ithaca, and he had a desire to die.

IV

HOW TELEMACHUS WENT TO SEEK HIS FATHER

When Ulysses had lived nearly seven years in the island of Calypso, his
son Telemachus, whom he had left in Ithaca as a little child, went forth
to seek for his father. In Ithaca he and his mother, Penelope, had long
been very unhappy. As Ulysses did not come home after the war, and as
nothing was heard about him from the day when the Greeks sailed from
Troy, it was supposed that he must be dead. But Telemachus was still but
a boy of twelve years old, and the father of Ulysses, Laertes, was very
old, and had gone to a farm in the country, where he did nothing but
take care of his garden. There was thus no King in Ithaca, and the boys,
who had been about ten years old when Ulysses went to Troy, were now
grown up, and, as their fathers had gone to the war, they did just as
they pleased. Twelve of them wanted to marry Penelope, and they, with
about a hundred others as wild as themselves, from the neighbouring
islands, by way of paying court to Penelope ate and drank all day at her
house. They killed the