The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 3: Books for ChildrenLamb, Charles
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The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 3: Books for Children
Lamb, Charles
Children's poetry; Children's stories
And now the sheep began to issue forth very fast, the males went
first, the females unmilked stood by, bleating and requiring the hand
of their shepherd in vain to milk them, their full bags sore with
being unemptied, but he much sorer with the loss of sight. Still as
the males passed, he felt the backs of those fleecy fools, never
dreaming, that they carried his enemies under their bellies: so they
passed on till the last ram came loaded with his wool and Ulysses
together. He stopped that ram and felt him, and had his hand once in
the hair of Ulysses, yet knew it not, and he chid the ram for being
last, and spoke to it as if it understood him, and asked it whether it
did not wish that its master had his eye again, which that abominable
Noman with his execrable rout had put out, when they had got him down
with wine; and he willed the ram to tell him whereabouts in the cave
his enemy lurked, that he might dash his brains and strew them about,
to ease his heart of that tormenting revenge which rankled in it.
After a deal of such foolish talk to the beast he let it go. When
Ulysses found himself free, he let go his hold, and assisted in
disengaging his friends. The rams which had befriended them they
carried off with them to the ships, where their companions with tears
in their eyes received them, as men escaped from death. They plied
their oars, and set their sails, and when they were got as far off
from shore as a voice would reach, Ulysses cried out to the Cyclop:
"Cyclop, thou should'st not have so much abused thy monstrous
strength, as to devour thy guests. Jove by my hand sends thee requital
to pay thy savage inhumanity." The Cyclop heard, and came forth
enraged, and in his anger he plucked a fragment of a rock, and threw
it with blind fury at the ships. It narrowly escaped lighting upon the
bark in which Ulysses sat, but with the fall it raised so fierce an
ebb, as bore back the ship till it almost touched the shore. "Cyclop,"
said Ulysses, "if any ask thee who imposed on thee that unsightly
blemish in thine eye, say it was Ulysses, son of Laertes: the king of
Ithaca am I called, the waster of cities." Then they crowded sail, and
beat the old sea, and forth they went with a forward gale; sad for
fore-past losses, yet glad to have escaped at any rate; till they came
to the isle where Æolus reigned, who is god of the winds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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