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 forward, smiling, and stretching out her hand. She took the hand of the foremost among them, and bade him and the whole party welcome.

'You have been long expected, my good friends,' said she. 'I and my maidens are well acquainted with you, although you do not appear to recognise us. Look at this piece of tapestry, and judge if your faces must not have been familiar to us.'

So the voyagers examined the web of cloth which the beautiful woman had been weaving in her loom; and, to their vast astonishment, they saw their own figures perfectly represented in different coloured threads. It was a lifelike picture of their recent adventures, showing them in the cave of Polyphemus, and how they had put out his one great moony eye; while in another part of the tapestry they were untying the leathern bags, puffed out with contrary winds; and farther on, they beheld themselves scampering away from the gigantic king of the Læstrygons, who had caught one of them by the leg. Lastly, there they were, sitting on the desolate shore of this very island, hungry and downcast, and looking ruefully at the bare bones of the stag which they devoured yesterday. This was as far as the work had yet proceeded; but when the beautiful woman should again sit down at her loom, she would probably make a picture of what had since happened to the strangers, and what was now going to happen.

'You see,' she said, 'that I know all about your troubles; and you cannot doubt that I desire to make you 131