Carefully the rooms were then searched by Ulysses and his followers, but nowhere could they find a single living traitor. The dead lay on the floor in heaps like fish that had been cast from the net upon the sands, and lie stiffening in the air. Ulysses was not content till he had punished every evil servant and treacherous man and woman about the palace or in the town in proportion to his misdeeds. Then by the aid of Euryclea, his faithful old nurse, he robed himself in garments fit for the shoulders of a king, and prepared to meet the queen. During all this time Penelope had remained in her apartments terrified by the confusion and noise of fighting in the palace, but praying always for her son. We can imagine her surprise and delight when she learned how the battle had turned, and that the beggar, who had fought so manfully, was indeed none other than her husband Ulysses. Once more in possession of the throne, the Greek hero and his son rapidly destroyed every vestige of the unhappy days that had passed, and soon the kingdom was again enjoying a prosperous and happy reign. JOHN BUNYAN The father of John Bunyan was a poor tinker, a mender of pots and kettles, working sometimes in his own house and sometimes in the homes of others. His son followed the same occupation and did his work well. Even after he became a popular preacher and a great author he kept on with his humble calling. It was a queer occupation for a man of genius, and scarcely any one would expect the man who followed it to write a book that would be more widely read than anything except the Bible. Evidently Bunyan was no common tinker. John Bunyan was born at Elstow, a village near Bedford, in 1628, a year famous in English history as that in which the king, Charles I, was forced to grant the Petition of Right presented by the House of Commons. But the commotion in politics produced little effect on father and child, and the latter grew up as most English boys of his time did grow, except that he had the advantage of attending a grammar school in Bedford, a greater advantage than it seems unless we remember that there were then no common schools in England. The young tinker was a violent and passionate boy, profane, and a leader in all the mischief of his kind. In his own account of his early life written long years afterward he accuses himself of all manner of sins. Yet from what he says in other places we know that he was far from being the worst of boys, and that many things that gave him the greatest concern were curiously exaggerated by his uneasy conscience. He must have been a strange little fellow, for while he was swearing, lying and leading raids upon his neighbors' fruit orchards he was often terrified by the awfulness of his sin and "trembling at the thoughts of the fearful torments of hell-fire."