attempts of these lawless men upon the person of his young son Telemachus,
she herself had put it into the heart of the prince to go and seek his
father in far countries; how in the shape of Mentor she had borne him
company in his long search; which, though failing, as she meant it should
fail, in its first object, had yet had this effect, that through hardships
he had learned endurance, through experience he had gathered wisdom, and
wherever his footsteps had been he had left such memorials of his worth as
the fame of Ulysses's son was already blown throughout the world. That it
was now not many days since Telemachus had arrived in the island, to the
great joy of the queen his mother, who had thought him dead, by reason of
his long absence, and had begun to mourn for him with a grief equal to
that which she endured for Ulysses: the goddess herself having so ordered
the course of his adventures that the time of his return should correspond
with the return of Ulysses, that they might together concert measures how
to repress the power and insolence of those wicked suitors. This the
goddess told him; but of the particulars of his son's adventures, of his
having been detained in the Delightful Island, which his father had so
lately left, of Calypso and her nymphs, and the many strange occurrences
which may be read with profit and delight in the history of the prince's
adventures, she forbore to tell him as yet, as judging that he would hear
them with greater pleasure from the lips of his son, when he should have
him in an hour of stillness and safety, when their work should be done,
and none of their enemies left alive to trouble them.

[Illustration: _Consulting how they might with safety bring about his
restoration_.]

Then they sat down, the goddess and Ulysses, at the foot of a wild olive-
tree, consulting how they might with safety bring about his restoration.
And when Ulysses revolved in his mind how that his enemies were a