The Odyssey · Homer
ARGUMENT. THE CONVERSATION WITH EUMAEUS.
“Well hast thou spoke (rejoin’d the attentive swain): Thy lips let fall no idle word or vain! Nor garment shalt thou want, nor aught beside, Meet for the wandering suppliant to provide. But in the morning take thy clothes again, For here one vest suffices every swain: No change of garments to our hinds is known; But when return’d, the good Ulysses’ son With better hand shall grace with fit attires His guest, and send thee where thy soul desires.” The honest herdsman rose, as this he said, And drew before the hearth the stranger’s bed; The fleecy spoils of sheep, a goat’s rough hide He spreads; and adds a mantle thick and wide; With store to heap above him, and below, And guard each quarter as the tempests blow. There lay the king, and all the rest supine; All, but the careful master of the swine: Forth hasted he to tend his bristly care; Well arm’d, and fenced against nocturnal air: His weighty falchion o’er his shoulder tied: His shaggy cloak a mountain goat supplied: With his broad spear the dread of dogs and men, He seeks his lodging in the rocky den. There to the tusky herd he bends his way, Where, screen’d from Boreas, high o’erarch’d they lay.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.