“Come,” the wanderer said easily, “give me the polished bow, that in your midst I may try my hands and strength”. Stung by the suitors’ gales of laughter, Penelope came to the poor fellow’s defence, saying that he should be given his chance, and keep the bow as a trophy if he succeeded. But with an agonised glance towards the stranger Telemachus over-ruled her. “Go to thy chamber,” he said, quite unlike himself, “and busy thyself with thine own tasks, the loom and the distaff.”

It was then that Penelope’s suitors spotted the beggar caressing the bow, almost as if he appreciated gentlemen’s weapons, and they sniggered loudly again. For an answer, as easily as a musician strings his harp he did what they could not and strung the mighty bow. Every lordly face in the hall changed colour. Then wordlessly he loosed off a single brass-tipped arrow clean through the axe heads, from first to last. “Telemachus,” he said, “the stranger has not brought shame on thee or thy hall, for see! the strength of my youth has not left me. Let there be music and wine!”

Unmarked by the feasting suitors, he made a slight motion towards Telemachus, who came to stand beside him, and the maidservants began to tiptoe out, silently bolting the doors behind them as they went. “And now,” said the stranger, laying aside his rags and revealing the powerful frame of a much younger man, “to aim at a mark no one has so far thought to shoot at!”