The old woman laid aside the washing and listened, but the tall man said: "As many birds come flying before the Emperor as gulls before a storm.
If only they would leave us in peace--" "Hark, that is Pollux; I know by the dogs," said the woman, hastening as fast as she could over the threshold and out to meet him.

But the expected visitor was already at the door.

He picked up the three four-footed Graces who leaped round him, one after the other by the skin of the neck, and gave each a tap on its nose.

Then, seeing the old woman, he took her head between his hands, and kissed her forehead, saying, "Good-evening, little Mother," and shook hands with the singer, adding, "How are you, great, big Father ?" "You are as big as I am," replied the man thus addressed, and he drew the younger man towards him, and laid one of his broad hands on his own grey head and the other on that of his first-born, with its wealth of brown hair.
"As if we were cast in the same mould," cried the youth; and in fact he was very like his father--like, no doubt, as a noble hunter is like a worn-out hack--as marble is like limestone--as a cedar is like a fir-tree.

Both were remarkably tall, had thick hair, dark eyes, and strongly aquiline noses, exactly of the same shape; but the cheerful brightness which irradiated the countenance of the youth had certainly not been inherited from the lute-player, but from the little woman who looked up into his face and patted his arm.
But whence did he derive the powerful, but indescribable something which gave nobility to his head, and of which it was impossible to say whether it lay in his eye, or in the lofty brow, arched so differently to that of either parent?
"I knew you would come," cried his mother.