1. By way of introduction, the faithless handmaid Melantho again shows her character in a harsh speech to Ulysses, "Get out, you beggar! Will you still keep sneaking through the house by night to spy out women?" So she reveals plainly what she is, and even mentions the test which she cannot stand. Ulysses in his reply enforces charity: "I was once rich, but I gave the poor wanderer alms." Beware of the day of reckoning: such is his repeated warning to all these people. Penelope also gives a sharp reproof to the shameless handmaid, and intimates the fate impending: "Thou hast done a deed which thy head shall atone for." It is again to be noted that the guilty are the inhuman, while the faithful have charity. Penelope specially shows this trait in the present Book, though her threat to Melantho is not gentle. Quite as Ulysses served Irus, Penelope is ready to serve Melantho; both can become uncharitable toward the uncharitable; both can meet evil with evil, and fight the negative with negation. 2. The main purpose of this portion of the interview is to furnish Penelope with hope. She seems on the point of giving up the long contest, she has played her last stratagem against the Suitors. Now she must choose one of them, her parents urge it, her son demands it; there seems no escape, though she hates the marriage like black Death. In such a frame of mind, the disguised Ulysses is to divert her thoughts with a story, to gain her confidence in his honesty, and to give a strong promise of her husband's speedy return. The manner in which he puts these three points in succession is worthy of study. First, he must give some account of himself, of his lineage and of his connections. Here he employs his old fiction, he feigns a tale, putting the scene into Crete, and allying himself with the famous stock of Minos, as well as with the well-known Cretan hero Idomeneus so often celebrated in the Iliad, whose brother he claimed to be. "There I saw Ulysses and entertained him." This story of his life has an analogy to what he told Eumaeus (Book XIV. 199) and Antinous (Book XVII. 425). All three differ in details, being adjusted to the person and the occasion; still all are cast into the same general mould, with the scene placed in the East on the borderland toward Phenicia and with the Trojan war in the background. It is another Homeric novelette suggesting a life of adventure on sea and land, and showing sparks of that enterprising Greek spirit, of which the Odyssey is the best record. But the poet adds: "So he went on fabricating lies like truth;" which indicates that he told more than is in the text and completed his story.