Yet neither for this, nor for the overthrow of his ship, nor his own perilous condition, would he give up the drenched vessel; but, wrestling with Neptune, got at length hold of her again, and then sat in her hulk, exulting over death, which he had escaped, and the salt waves which he gave the sea again to give to other men: his ship, striving to live, floated at random, cuffed from wave to wave, hurled to and fro by all the winds: now Boreas tossed it to Notus, Notus passed it to Eurus, and Eurus to the West Wind, who kept up the horrid tennis.

Them in mad sport Ino Leucothea beheld; Ino Leucothea, now a sea goddess, but once a mortal and the daughter of Cadmus; she with pity beheld Ulysses the mark of their fierce contention, and rising from the waves alighted on the ship, in shape like to the sea bird which is called the cormorant, and in her beak she held a wonderful girdle made of seaweeds which grow at the bottom of the ocean.

This girdle she dropped at his feet; and the bird spoke to Ulysses, and counseled him not to trust any more to that fatal vessel against which Neptune had leveled his furious wrath, nor to those ill-befriending garments which Calypso had given him, but to quit both it and them, and trust for his safety to swimming.

"And here," said the seeming bird, "tie firmly about your waist this girdle, which has virtue to protect the wearer at sea, and you shall safely reach the

shore; but when you have landed, cast it far back from you into the sea."

He did as the sea bird instructed him: he stripped himself naked, and fastening the wondrous girdle about his waist, cast himself into the sea to swim. The bird dived past his sight into the fathomless abyss of the ocean.

Two days and nights he spent in struggling with the waves, though sore buffeted and almost spent, never giving himself up for lost, such confidence he had in the charm which he wore about his middle, and in the words of that divine bird.

But the third morning the winds grew calm, and all the heavens were clear. Then he saw himself nigh land, which he knew to be the coast of the Phæacians, a people good to strangers, and abounding in ships, by whose favor he doubted not that he should soon obtain a passage to his own country.

And such joy he conceived in his heart, as good sons have that esteem their father's life dear, when long sickness has held him down to his bed, and wasted his body, and they see at length health return to the old man, with restored strength and spirits, in reward of their many prayers to the gods for his safety so precious was the prospect of home return to Ulysses, that he might restore health to his country (his better parent), that had long languished as full of distempers in his absence.

And then for his own sake he had joy to see the shores, the woods, so nigh and within his grasp as they seemed; and he labored with all the might of hands and feet to reach with swimming that nighseeming land.

But when he approached near, a horrid sound of a huge sea beating against rocks informed him that here was no place for landing, nor any harbor for man's resort; but through the weeds and the foam which the sea belched up against the land he could dimly discover the rugged shore all bristled with flints, and all that part of the coast one impending rock that seemed impossible to climb, and the water all about so deep, that not a sand was there for any tired foot to rest upon.

Every moment he feared lest some wave more cruel than the rest should crush him against a cliff, rendering worse than vain all his landing; and should he swim to seek a more commodious haven farther on, he was fearful lest, weak and spent as he was, the winds would force him back a long way off into the main, where the terrible god Neptune,—for wrath that he had so nearly escaped his power, having gotten him again into his domain, -would send out some great whale to swallow him up alive; with such malignity he still pursued him.

While these thoughts distracted him with diversity of dangers, one bigger wave drove against a sharp rock his naked body, which it gashed and tore, and

wanted little of breaking all his bones, so rude was the shock.

But in this extremity she prompted him that never failed him at need. Minerva (who is wisdom itself) put it into his thoughts no longer to keep swimming off and on, as one dallying with danger, but boldly to force the shore that threatened him. She guided his wearied and well-nigh exhausted limbs to the mouth of the fair river Callirrhoë, which not far from thence disbursed its watery tribute to the ocean. Here the shores were easy and accessible, and the rocks, which rather adorned than defended its banks, were so smooth that they seemed polished of purpose to invite the landing of our sea wanderer, and to atone for the uncourteous treatment which those less hospitable cliffs had afforded him.

And the god of the river, as if in pity, stayed his current and smoothed his waters, to make easy the landing of Ulysses. .

So by the favor of the river's god Ulysses crept to land, half drowned; both his knees faltering, his strong hands falling down through weakness from the excessive toils he had endured, his cheek and nostrils flowing with froth of the sea brine, much of which he swallowed in that conflict; voice and breath spent, down he sank as in death. Dead weary he was. It seemed that the sea had soaked through his heart, and the pains he felt in all his veins were little

less than those which one feels that has endured the tortures of the rack.

But when his spirits came a little to themselves, and his recollection by degrees began to return, he rose up, and unloosing from his waist the girdle or charm which the divine bird had given him, and remembering the charge which he had received with it, he flung it from him into the river. Back it swam with the course of the ebbing stream till it reached the sea, where the fair hands of Ino Leucothea received it to keep it as a pledge of safety to any future shipwrecked mariner, that like Ulysses should wander in those perilous waves.

Ulysses then bent his course to the nearest woods, where, entering in, he found a thicket, mostly of wild olives and such low trees, yet growing so intertwined and knit together that the moist wind had not leave to play through their branches, nor the sun's scorching beams to pierce their recesses, nor any shower to beat through, they grew so thick and as it were folded each in the other.

Here creeping in, he made his bed of the leaves which were beginning to fall, of which such was the abundance that two or three men might have spread them ample coverings, such as might shield them from the winter's rage, though the air breathed steel and blew as if it would burst.

Here, creeping in, he heaped up store of leaves all about him, as a man would pile billets upon a winter