About dinner-time there came a special messenger from Pompey with a letter, which was in Pompey’s name, but Phil’s handwriting. “Ted Pompey to Caesar Bevis. Please tell me who you are going to send to be with me in my camp, and let him come to the stile in Barn Copse at half-past five, and I will send Tim to be with you till the white handkerchiefs are up. And tell me if the lieutenants are to carry the eagles, or some one else.” Bevis wrote back:--“Caesar to Pompey greeting,”--this style he copied from his books,--“Caesar will send Charlie to be with you, as he can ran quick, though he is little. The lieutenants are not to carry the eagles, but a soldier for them. And Caesar wishes you health.” Then in the afternoon Mark had to go and tell Cecil and others, who were to send on the message to the rest of their party, to meet Bevis at the gate by the New Sea at half-past five, and to mind and not be one moment later. While Mark was gone, Bevis roamed about the garden and orchard, and back again to the stable and sheds, and then into the rick-yard, which was strewn with twigs and branches torn off from the elms that creaked as the gale struck them; then indoors, and from room to room. He could not rest anywhere, he was so impatient. At last he picked up the little book of the Odyssey, with its broken binding and frayed margin, from the chair where he had last loft it; and taking it up into the bench-room, opened it at the twenty-second book, where his favourite hero wreaked his vengeance on the suitors. With his own bow in his right hand, and the book in his left, Bevis read, marching up and down the room, stamping and shouting aloud as he came to the passages he liked best:-- “Swift as the word, the parting arrow sings, And bears thy fate, Antinous, on its wings! * * * * “For fate who fear’d amidst a feastful band? And fate to numbers by a single hand? * * * * “Two hundred oxen every prince shall pay; The waste of years refunded in a day. Till then thy wrath is just,--Ulysses burn’d With high disdain, and sternly thus return’d. * * * * “Soon as his store of flying fates was spent, Against the wall he set the bow unbent; And now his shoulders bear the massy shield, And now his hands two beamy javelins wield.” Bevis had dropped his bow and seized one of Mark’s spears, not hearing, as he stamped and shouted, Mark coming up the stairs. Mark snatched up one of the swords, and as Bevis turned they rattled their weapons together, and shouted in their fierce joy. When satisfied they stopped, and Mark said he had come by the New Sea, and the waves were the biggest he had ever seen there, the wind was so furious.