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Autolycus, of course, waited on us, and when he handed me the fish, and I helped myself to one of the four pieces, he said sternly, "Two, please," and I meekly took the other. The engineer had no fish, but on the other hand he had an entree which was denied us. Both cooks rose to a savoury. It tasted rather like a bird's-nest, and one felt it had taken a lot of making and rolling in brown hands.
Now she drew near her lord to wash him, and straightway she knew the scar of the wound, that the boar had dealt him with his white tusk long ago, when Odysseus went to Parnassus to see Autolycus, and the sons of Autolycus, his mother's noble father, who outdid all men in thievery and skill in swearing.
There his father and lady mother were glad of his returning, and asked him of all his adventures, and of his wound how he came by it, and duly he told them all, namely how the boar gashed him with his white tusk in the chase, when he had gone to Parnassus with the sons of Autolycus.
"No good?" demands Autolycus. "No," and disdainfully handing the plate back to the entirely indifferent cook, he proceeds to produce from somewhere about his person a teapot and two tiny eggs. Luncheon is much worse, for the food that appears is so incalculably greasy that it argues a more than bowing acquaintance with native ghee.
Thus through the livelong day to the going down of the sun they feasted, and every man had his full share so that all were satisfied; but when the sun set and it came on dark, they went to bed and enjoyed the boon of sleep. When the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, the sons of Autolycus went out with their hounds hunting, and Ulysses went too.
'Even so we twain were sitting holding sad discourse, I on the one side, stretching forth my sword over the blood, while on the other side the ghost of my friend told all his tale. 'Anon came up the soul of my mother dead, Anticleia, the daughter of Autolycus the great-hearted, whom I left alive when I departed for sacred Ilios.
The Greeks had a God of Thieves, named Hermes, whom Autolycus worshipped, and people thought more good of his cunning tricks than harm of his dishonesty.
Autolycus, looking very worried, is busied with the task of preparing the evening meal. One of the chuprassis, his gaudy uniform laid aside, and clad in a fragment of cotton, is sluicing himself with water and praying audibly. The dhobi is beating our clothes white on stones in the tank. In the village the women are grinding corn; the oxen are drawing water from the well.
One felt as if this must have been the order in that delightful seaboard Bohemia where Florizel and Perdita courted in such sweet accents, and the Puritan sang Psalms to hornpipes, and the four-and-twenty shearers danced with nosegays in their bosoms, and chanted their three songs apiece at the old shepherd's festival; and one could not help picturing to oneself what havoc among good peoples purses, and tribulation for benignant constables, might be worked here by the arrival, over stile and footpath, of a new Autolycus.
It happened once that Autolycus had gone to Ithaca and had found the child of his daughter just born. As soon as he had done supper Euryclea set the infant upon his knees and said, "Autolycus, you must find a name for your grandson; you greatly wished that you might have one."
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