ot know much about Ulysses when he was a little boy, except that
he used to run about the garden with his father, asking questions, and
begging that he might have fruit trees "for his very own." He was a
great pet, for his parents had no other son, so his father gave him
thirteen pear trees, and forty fig trees, and promised him fifty rows of
vines, all covered with grapes, which he could eat when he liked, without
asking leave of the gardener. So he was not tempted to steal fruit, like
his grandfather.

When Autolycus gave Ulysses his name, he said that he must come to stay
with him, when he was a big boy, and he would get splendid presents.
Ulysses was told about this, so, when he was a tall lad, he crossed the
sea and drove in his chariot to the old man's house on Mount Parnassus.
Everybody welcomed him, and next day his uncles and cousins and he went
out to hunt a fierce wild boar, early in the morning. Probably Ulysses
took his own dog, named Argos, the best of hounds, of which we shall hear
again, long afterwards, for the dog lived to be very old. Soon the
hounds came on the scent of a wild boar, and after them the men went,
with spears in their hands, and Ulysses ran foremost, for he was already
the swiftest runner in Greece.

He came on a great boar lying in a tangled thicket of boughs and bracken,
a dark place where the sun never shone, nor could the rain pierce
through. Then the noise of the men's shouts and the barking of the dogs
awakened the boar, and up he sprang, bristling all over his back, and
with fire shining from his eyes. In rushed Ulysses first of all, with
his spear raised to strike, but the boar was too quick for him, and ran
in, and drove his sharp tusk sideways, ripping up the thigh of Ulysses.
But the boar's tusk missed the bone, and Ulysses sent his sharp spear
into the beast's right shoulder, and the spear went clean through, and
the boar fell dead, with a loud cry. The uncles of Ulysses bound up his
wound carefully, and sang a magical song over it, as the French soldiers
wanted to do to Joan of Arc when the arrow pierced her shoulder at the
siege of Orleans. Then the blood ceased to flow, and soon Ulysses was
quite healed of his wound. They thought that he would be a good warrior,
and gave him splendid presents, and when he went home again he told all
that had happened to his father and mother, and his nurse, Eurycleia. But
there was always a long white mark or scar above his left