hield, a goddess armed, fighting their battles. Nor
did that dreadful pair desist, till they had laid all their foes at
their feet. At their feet they lay in shoals; like fishes, when the
fishermen break up their nets, so they lay gasping and sprawling at
the feet of Ulysses and his son. And Ulysses remembered the prediction
of Tiresias, which said that he was to perish by his own guests,
unless he slew those who knew him not.

Then certain of the queen's household went up and told Penelope what
had happened, and how her lord Ulysses was come home, and had slain
the suitors. But she gave no heed to their words, but thought that
some frenzy possessed them, or that they mocked her: for it is the
property of such extremes of sorrow as she had felt, not to believe
when any great joy cometh. And she rated and chid them exceedingly for
troubling her. But they the more persisted in their asseverations of
the truth of what they had affirmed; and some of them had seen the
slaughtered bodies of the suitors dragged forth of the hall. And they
said, "That poor guest whom you talked with last night was Ulysses."
Then she was yet more fully persuaded that they mocked her, and she
wept. But they said, "This thing is true which we have told. We sat
within, in an inner room in the palace, and the doors of the hall
were shut on us, but we heard the cries and the groans of the men
that were killed, but saw nothing, till at length your son called to
us to come in, and entering we saw Ulysses standing in the midst of
the slaughtered." But she persisting in her unbelief, said, that it
was some god which had deceived them to think it was the person of
Ulysses.

By this time Telemachus and his father had cleansed their hands from
the slaughter, and were come to where the queen was talking with those
of her household; and when she saw Ulysses, she stood motionless,
and had no power to speak, sudden surprise and joy and fear and many
passions strove within her. Sometimes she was clear that it was her
husband that she saw, and sometimes the alteration which twenty years
had made in his person (yet that was not much) perplexed her that she
knew not what to think, and for joy she could not believe, and yet for
joy she would not but believe, and, above all, that sudden change from
a beggar to a king troubled her, and wrought uneasy scruples in her
mind. But Telemachus, seeing her strangeness, blamed her, and called
her an ungentle and tyrannous mo