We had sent _Narcissus_ for review to the papers, and, as a consequence, about this time, made the acquaintance of Mr. J. A. Fuller Maitland, then musical critic of the _Times_; he introduced us to that learned musician William Smith Rockstro, under whom we studied medieval counterpoint while composing _Ulysses_. We had already made some progress with it when it occurred to Butler that it would not take long and might, perhaps, be safer if he were to look at the original poem, just to make sure that Lamb had not misled me. Not having forgotten all his Greek, he bought a copy of the _Odyssey_ and was so fascinated by it that he could not put it down. When he came to the Phoeacian episode of Ulysses at Scheria he felt he must be reading the description of a real place and that something in the personality of the author was eluding him. For months he was puzzled, and, to help in clearing up the mystery, set about translating the poem. In August, 1891, he had preceded me to Chiavenna, and on a letter I wrote him, telling him when to expect me, he made this note: It was during the few days that I was at Chiavenna (at the Hotel Grotta Crimee) that I hit upon the feminine authorship of the _Odyssey_. I did not find out its having been written at Trapani till January, 1892. He suspected that the authoress in describing both Scheria and Ithaca was drawing from her native country and searched on the Admiralty charts for the features enumerated in the poem; this led him to the conclusion that the country could only be Trapani, Mount Eryx, and the AEgadean Islands. As soon as he could after this discovery he went to Sicily to study the locality and found it in all respects suitable for his theory; indeed, it was astonishing how things kept turning up to support his view. It is all in his book _The Authoress of the Odyssey_, published in 1897 and dedicated to his friend Cavaliere Biagio Ingroja of Calatafimi. His first visit to Sicily was in 1892, in August--a hot time of the year, but it was his custom to go abroad in the autumn. He returned to Sicily every year (except one), but latterly went in the spring. He made many friends all over the island, and after his death the people of Calatafimi called a street by his name, the Via Samuel Butler, "thus," as Ingroja wrote when he announced the event to me, "honouring a great man's memory, handing down his name to posterity, and doing homage to the friendly English nation." Besides showing that the _Odyssey_ was written by a woman in Sicily and translating the poem into English prose, he also translated the _Iliad_, and, in March, 1895, went to Greece and the Troad to see the country therein described, where he found nothing to cause him to disagree with the received theories.