d woman always to be treated
either as a toy or as a beast of burden, or at any rate as an
incubus. Why not sing of woman also as she is when she is
unattached and free from the trammels and persecutions of this
tiresome tyrant, this insufferably self-conceited bore and booby,
man?

"I wish, my dear," exclaims her mother Arete, after one of these
little outbreaks, "that you would do it yourself. I am sure you
could do it beautifully if you would only give your mind to it."

"Very well, mother," she replies, "and I will bring in all about you
and father, and how I go out for a washing-day with the maids,"--and
she kept her word, as I will presently show you.

I should tell you that Ulysses, having got away from the goddess
Calypso, with whom he had been living for some seven or eight years
on a lonely and very distant island in mid-ocean, is shipwrecked on
the coast of Phaeacia, the chief town of which is Scheria. After
swimming some forty-eight hours in the water he effects a landing at
the mouth of a stream, and, not having a rag of clothes on his back,
covers himself up under a heap of dried leaves and goes to sleep. I
will now translate from the Odyssey itself.

"So here Ulysses slept, worn out with labour and sorrow; but Minerva
went off to the chief town of the Phaeacians, a people who used to
live in Hypereia near the wicked Cyclopes. Now the Cyclopes were
stronger than they and plundered them, so Nausithous settled them in
Scheria far from those who would loot them. He ran a wall round
about the city, built houses and temples, and allotted the lands
among his people; but he was gathered to his fathers, and the good
king Alcinous was now reigning. To his palace then Minerva hastened
that she might help Ulysses to get home.

"She went straight to the painted bedroom of Nausicaa, who was
daughter to King Alcinous, and lovely as a goddess. Near her there
slept two maids-in-waiting, both very pretty, one on either side of
the doorway, which was closed with a beautifully made door. She
took the form of the famous Captain Dumas's daughter, who was a
bosom friend of Nausicaa and just her own age; then coming into the
room like a breath of wind she stood near the head of the bed and
said--

"'Nausicaa, what could your mother have been about to have such a
lazy daughter? Here are your clothes all lying in disorder, yet you
are going to be married almost directly, and should not only be
well-dressed yours