When morning was come, Ulysses made offer to depart, as if he were not willing to burthen his host’s hospitality any longer, but said, that he would go and try the humanity of the town’s folk, if any there would bestow upon him a bit of bread or a cup of drink.  Perhaps the queen’s suitors (he said) out of their full feasts would bestow a scrap on him:  for he could wait at table, if need were, and play the nimble serving-man, he could fetch wood (he said) or build a fire, prepare roast meat or boiled, mix the wine with water, or do any of those offices which recommended poor men like him to services in great men’s houses.

“Alas! poor guest,” said Eumaeus, “you know not what you speak.  What should so poor and old a man as you do at the suitors’ tables?  Their light minds are not given to such grave servitors.  They must have youths, richly tricked out in flowing vests, with curled hair, like so many of Jove’s cup-bearers, to fill out the wine to them as they sit at table, and to shift their trenchers.  Their gorged insolence would but despise and make a mock at thy age.  Stay here.  Perhaps the queen, or Telemachus, hearing of thy arrival, may send to thee of their bounty.”

As he spake these words, the steps of one crossing the front court were heard, and a noise of the dogs fawning and leaping about as for joy; by which token Eumaeus guessed that it was the prince, who hearing of a traveller being arrived at Eumaeus’s cottage that brought tidings of his father, was come to search the truth, and Eumaeus said:  “It is the tread of Telemachus, the son of king Ulysses.”  Before he could well speak the words, the prince was at the door, whom Ulysses rising to receive, Telemachus would not suffer that so aged a man, as he appeared, should rise to do respect to him, but he courteously and reverently took him by the hand, and inclined his head to him, as if he had surely known that it was his father indeed:  but Ulysses covered his eyes with his hands, that he might not shew the waters which stood in them.  And Telemachus said, “Is this the man who can tell us tidings of the king my father?”

“He brags himself to be a Cretan born,” said Eumaeus, “and that he has been a soldier and a traveller, but whether he speak the truth or not, he alone can tell.  But whatsoever he has been, what he is now is apparent.  Such as he appears, I give him to you; do what you will with him; his boast at present is that he is at the very best a supplicant.”

“Be he what he may,” said Telemachus, “I accept him at your hands.  But where I should bestow him I know not, seeing that in the palace his age would not exempt him from the scorn and contempt which my mother’s suitors in their light minds would be sure to fling upon him.  A mercy if he escaped without blows:  for they are a company of evil men, whose profession is wrongs and violence.”