called her "the Daughter of the Swan." She could speak in the very voice
of any man or woman, so folk also named her Echo, and it was believed
that she could neither grow old nor die, but would at last pass away to
the Elysian plain and the world's end, where life is easiest for men. No
snow comes thither, nor great storm, nor any rain; but always the river
of Ocean that rings round the whole earth sends forth the west wind to
blow cool on the people of King Rhadamanthus of the fair hair. These
were some of the stories that men told of fair Helen, but Ulysses was
never sorry that he had not the fortune to marry her, so fond he was of
her cousin, his wife, Penelope, who was very wise and good.

When Ulysses brought his wife home they lived, as the custom was, in the
palace of his father, King Laertes, but Ulysses, with his own hands,
built a chamber for Penelope and himself. There grew a great olive tree
in the inner court of the palace, and its stem was as large as one of the
tall carved pillars of the hall. Round about this tree Ulysses built the
chamber, and finished it with close-set stones, and roofed it over, and
made close-fastening doors. Then he cut off all the branches of the
olive tree, and smoothed the trunk, and shaped it into the bed-post, and
made the bedstead beautiful with inlaid work of gold and silver and
ivory. There was no such bed in Greece, and no man could move it from
its place, and this bed comes again into the story, at the very end.

Now time went by, and Ulysses and Penelope had one son called Telemachus;
and Eurycleia, who had been his father's nurse, took care of him. They
were all very happy, and lived in peace in rocky Ithaca, and Ulysses
looked after his lands, and flocks, and herds, and went hunting with his
dog Argos, the swiftest of hounds.