refrains from any attempt to detain his guests longer than seems agreeable to themselves. A portion of his speech, as rendered by Pope, has passed into a popular maxim as to the true limits of hospitality, and has been quoted, no doubt, by many, with very little idea that they were indebted to Homer for the precept—
Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest."
Another maxim of the hospitable Spartan has long been adopted by Englishmen—that all wise men, who have a long day's journey before them, should lay in a substantial breakfast. This the travellers do, and then prepare to mount their chariot; Telemachus bearing with him, as the parting gift of his royal host, a bowl of silver wondrously chased, "the work of Vulcan"—too fair to come from any mortal hand—which Menelaus had himself received from the King of Sidon; while Helen adds an embroidered robe "that glistened like a star," one of many which she has woven with her own hands, which she begs him to keep to adorn his bride on her marriage-day. Even as they part, lo! there is an omen in the sky—an eagle bearing off a white goose in her talons. Who shall expound it? Menelaus, who is appealed to, is no soothsayer. Helen alone can unlock the riddle:—
Reared in the bleak rock, nursling of the hill,
And in the stormy ravin of his wild will
Seized on the white goose, delicately bred,—
So brave Ulysses, after countless ill,
Comes from afar off, dealing vengeance dread."
