he swineherd Eumaeus, with whose aid the plot for the
destruction of the wooers is to be carried out; and Athena summons
Telemachus to return from Lacedaemon to meet his father and bear his part
in the final scenes. When the young man returns to the palace, after his
interview with his father, "the nurse Euryclea saw him far before the
rest, as she was strewing skin coverlets upon the carven chairs; and
straightway she drew near him, weeping, and all the other maidens of
Odysseus, of the hardy heart, gathered about him, and kissed him
lovingly on the head and shoulders. Now wise Penelope came forth from
her chamber, like Artemis or golden Aphrodite, and cast her arms about
her dear son, and fell a-weeping, and kissed his face and both his
beautiful eyes, and wept aloud, and spake to him winged words:

"'Thou art come, Telemachus, sweet light of mine eyes; methought I should
see thee never again, after thou hadst gone in thy ship to Pylus,
secretly, and without my will, to seek tidings of thy dear father. Come
now, tell me, what sign didst thou get of him?'"

Telemachus tells his mother of his journey, and his friend Theoclymenus,
who has the gift of second-sight, prophesies the speedy return of
Odysseus. Soon the hero himself appears as a beggar in his own halls,
and is roughly treated by the haughty wooers. He soundly whips the
braggart beggar Irus, and the story of his presence is noised throughout
the house.

Constant Penelope is ever anxious to hear some word of her lord, and
every wandering stranger with a tale to tell could win rich gifts from
her by devising some story of Odysseus. She has heard of the beggar in
her halls, and summons him to her presence and questions him, and tells
him of her grief and her longing for more news of the absent one. When
crafty Odysseus fashioned a story of his entertaining her lord in Crete,
her tears flowed as she listened, and she wept for her own lord who was
sitting by her. The disguised hero had compassion for his wife; but he
craftily hid his tears, and described the appearance of Odysseus so
fully that she could not deny the certain likeness.

Then the aged nurse Euryclea, who had tended him in his youth, is asked
to wash the feet of the old man. As the crone makes ready the caldron, a
sudden fear seizes Odysseus lest when she handles his foot she might
know the scar of the wound that the boar had dealt him with its white
tusk in his boyhood. When the old woman took the