red my hidden paradise--my Alcinoues garden,
so to say"; and he quoted two well-known lines of Homer in the original
Greek, adding: "or if you prefer it in Pope's translation, which I
think,--don't you?--remains the best:

"Close to the gates a spacious garden lies,
From storms defended and inclement skies--

"and so on. Alas! for an old man's memory! It grows shorter and
shorter--like his life, eh? Never mind, you are welcome, sir stranger,
mysteriously tossed up here like Ulysses, on our island coast."

I gazed with natural wonderment at this strange individual, who thus in
the heart of the wilderness had saluted me with a meticulously pure
English accent, and welcomed me in a quotation from Homer in the
original Greek. Who, in the devil's name, was this odd character who, I
saw, as I looked closer at him, was, as he had hinted, quite an old man,
though his unusual erectness and sprightliness of manner, lent him an
illusive air of youth? Who on earth was he?--and how did he happen in
the middle of this haunted wood?

CHAPTER V

_Calypso._

Of course a glance, and the first sound of his voice, had told me that I
had to do with a gentleman, one of those vagabond English gentlemen in
exile who form a type peculiar, I think, to the English race; men that
are a curious combination of aristocrat and gipsy, soldier, scholar, and
philosopher; men of good family, who have drifted everywhere, seen and
seen through everything, but in all their wanderings have never lost
their sense and habit of "form," their boyish zest in living, their
humorous stoicism, and, above all, their lordly accent.

"Now that you have found us, Sir Ulysses"--continued my eccentric host,
motioning me, with an indescribably princely wave of the hand to
accompany him--"you must certainly give us the pleasure of your company
to luncheon. Visitors are as rare as black swans on this _Ultima Thule_
of ours--though, by the way, the black swan, _cygnus atratus,_ is
nothing like so rare as the ancients believed. I have shot them myself
out in Australia. Still they are rare enough for the purpose of
imagery, though really not so rare as a human being one can talk
intelligently to on this island."

Talk! My friend, indeed, very evidently was a talker--one of those
fantastic monologists to whom an audience is little more than a symbol.
I saw that there was no need for me to do any of the talking. He was
more than glad to do it all. Plainly