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'Whither away now, wretched wight, amid these mountain-summits alone and astray? And yonder in the styes of Circe, transformed to swine, thy comrades lie penned and make their lairs!" Odyssey, bk. "Prosper," said my father, seriously, "we must return to the ship." "I suppose so," I admitted; but with a rising temper, so that my tone contradicted him. "It is most necessary.
When I am a man, and can fight my own battles, then it will be time enough to lay claim to my father's realm; and it may be that if I remain in thraldom till that time no one will guess who I am. As a thrall, then, I must work, even though that work be no better than the cleaning of my master's stables and pig styes Get back, you greedy grunter!"
In the farms were styes full of half-starved pigs, grunting and groaning with hideous effect. They were turned loose to fend for themselves, ran rampant over the carefully sown ground and growing potatoes the sad results of months of painstaking effort. Fowls fluttered and screamed with wild flapping wings, men seized the eggs and drank them down in a fierce famished hunger.
"Come along, then, to the styes," said the Great Novelist, and he added, "Perhaps you're not much of a breeder." We blushed. We thought of the five little faces around the table for which we provide food by writing our interviews. "No," we said, "we were not much of a breeder." "Now then," said the Great Novelist as we reached our goal, "how do you like this stye?" "Very much indeed," we said.
It was a breezy, sunny autumn day, and all the world about him was astir with life; gawky yellow-legged fowls pecked and scratched round his feet with prodigious activity, calves were bleating in the adjacent pens, while the very pigs were scuttling about their styes, squealing the while as though it were supper-time.
Such a screaming as there was of the street boys, who pursued the beasts, such a grunting of hogs, into whose styes the does sprang without respect, and such a running of honorable city women, who were struck with fear of being maltreated by the horned animals, who were nevertheless not their husbands, and such a yelping of noble butcher dogs, which probably took the does for calves gone mad!
"Hogs!" returned Randall. "A decent Hampshire hog would scorn to be lodged as many a knight and squire and lady too is now, pigging it in styes and hovels and haylofts by night, and pranking it by day with the best!" "Sooth enough," said Smallbones. "Yea, we have had two knights and their squires beseeching us for leave to sleep under our waggon!
They were gazing at a cabin that squatted meekly over against the wall of oaks. Its roof was barely visible above the surrounding stockade, while the barn and styes and sheds were hidden entirely beyond the slope. It was, in truth, the most primitive and insignificant house they had seen that day. "He was one of the first to build in this virgin waste," mused the young man aloud.
Outside the yard he had run a strong fence of oaken posts, split, and set pretty close together, while inside he had built twelve styes near one another for the sows to lie in.
As he spoke he bound his girdle round him and went to the styes where the young sucking pigs were penned. He picked out two which he brought back with him and sacrificed. He singed them, cut them up, and spitted them; when the meat was cooked he brought it all in and set it before Ulysses, hot and still on the spit, whereon Ulysses sprinkled it over with white barley meal.
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