Page:Homer. The Odyssey (IA homerodyssey00collrich).pdf/60

themselves to bathe. An outdoor banquet forms part of the day's enjoyment; for the good queen, Nausicaa's mother, has stored the wain with delicate viands and a goat-skin of sweet wine. When this is over, the girls begin to play at ball. Ulysses, be it remembered, is all this while lying fast asleep under his heap of leaves, and, as it happens, close by the spot where this merry party are disporting themselves. By chance Nausicaa, too eager in her game, throws the ball out into the sea; whereupon the whole chorus of handmaidens raise a cry of dismay, which at once awakens the sleeper. He is puzzled, when he comes to himself, to make out where he is; and still more confounded, when he peers out from his hiding-place, to find himself in the close neighbourhood of this bevy of joyous damsels, especially when he bethinks himself of the very primitive style of his present costume; for the scarf which the sea-nymph gave him as a talisman he had cast into the sea upon his landing, as she had especially charged him. But Ulysses is far too old a traveller to allow an over-punctilious modesty to stand in his way when he is in danger of starving. He has no idea of missing this opportunity of supplying his wants merely because he has lost his wardrobe. He extemporises some very slight covering out of an olive-bough, and, in this strange attire, makes his sudden appearance before the party. Nausicaa's maidens all scream and take to flight—very excusably; but the king's daughter, with a true nobility, stands firm. She sees only a shipwrecked man, and "to the pure all things are pure." Ulysses is a courtier as well as a traveller, and knows much of "cities and men;" and