And her father, smiling at her strange eagerness, said, "My darling child may take the car; whate'er our daughter asks, we give." Swiftly her attendants prepared the wain and harnessed the mules. They loaded it with the soiled robes and dresses that the maiden brought from her bower, and the good mother put on top a basket filled with cates and dainties, and a wine-skin, and a cruse of olive oil wherewith to anoint the maidens after their bath. Nausicaa climbed into the wain, and away they sped with laughter and with song, this bright bevy of maidens. When they reached the spot where all the falling streams emptied their waters into a wide basin, they unharnessed the mules and let them loose to graze on the plain, while all the girls set gayly to their task. At length they had finished their toil; every garment had been steeped and trodden with their dainty feet, and rinsed and spread out to dry on the hot sands, which sparkled in the sunlight. Then the maidens undressed and dabbled and splashed one another, and frolicked in the crystal pool. Tired with work and play they anointed their dripping limbs with the olive oil and sat down to rest in the shade. And Nausicaa unpacked the basket, and they ate and drank of the good things that the Queen had provided. This done, and while the clothes were yet drying in the sun, they played ball in the meadow, tossing it from one to another; and all the while Nausicaa guided their movements, keeping time with a rustic ballad measure. Meanwhile, all unknown to these merry maidens, deep in the shelter of a low-branched tree, Ulysses lay asleep. A tempest had wrecked his ship and robbed him of all his companions, and he had only the day before, by help of the goddess Leucothea, been saved, and hardly saved, from the devouring sea. Clinging to a spar he had been cast upon the Phæacian shore after many hours in the storm-tossed deep. Worn and bruised by battling with the breakers, he had sought shelter under the drooping branches of two ancient olive trees. Beneath this covert he made a great bed of fallen leaves, and heaping them above him, soon fell into a deep slumber sent in mercy to restore him by the ever-watchful Minerva. It chanced that in their game a girl missed the ball that Nausicaa threw, and it fell into the rapid stream, and was lost. The girls all shrieked, and the piercing cry waked the sleeping Ulysses. "Alas!" he lamented, "upon what inhospitable coast have I been cast? Is it possessed by fierce barbarians who will slay, or by men who will prove pitiful? Do I hear the voices of nymphs, or dryads, or of human maids?"