At length a free ass, I capered for joy, and softly ambling up to the mares, chose out such as I thought would be the fittest for my concubines. But here my joyful hopes gave place to extreme danger. For the stallions, who were terribly strong creatures, more than a match for any ass, regarding me with suspicion, furiously pursued me as their rival, without respect for the laws of hospitable Jupiter. One of them, with his head and neck and ample chest aloft, struck at me like a pugilist with his forefeet; another, turning his brawny back, let fly at me with his hind feet; and another, with a vicious neigh, his ears thrown back, and showing his white teeth, sharp as spears, bit me all over. It was like what I have read in history of the King of Thrace, who exposed his unhappy guests to be lacerated and devoured by wild horses; for so sparing was that powerful tyrant of his barley, that he appeased the hunger of his voracious horses by casting human bodies to them for food. In fact, I was so worried and distracted by the continual attacks of the horses, that I wished myself back again at the mill-round. Fortune, however, would not be satisfied with my torments, and soon after visited me with another calamity; for I was employed to bring home wood from a mountain, and a boy, the most villainous of all boys, was appointed to drive me. It was not only that I was wearied by toiling up and down the steep and lofty mountain, nor that I wore away my hoofs by running on sharp stones, but I was cudgeled without end, so that all my bones ached to the very marrow. Moreover, by continually striking me on the off-haunch, and always in the same place, till the skin was broken, he occasioned a great ulcerous cavity, gaping like a trench or a window; yet he never ceased to hit me on the raw. He likewise laid such a load of wood on my back that you might have thought it was a burden prepared for an elephant, and not for a donkey. And whenever the ill-balanced load inclined to one side, instead of taking away some of the fagots from the heavier side, and thus easing me by somewhat lightening, or at least equalizing the pressure, he always remedied the inequality of the weight by the addition of stones. Nor yet, after so many miseries which I had endured, was he content with the immoderate weight of my burden; but when it happened that we had to pass over a river, he would leap on my back in order to keep his feet dry, as if his weight was but a trifling addition to the heavy mass. And if by any accident I happened to fall, through the weight of my burden and the slipperiness of the muddy bank, instead of giving me a helping hand, as he ought to have done, and pulling me up by the head-stall, or by my tail, or removing a part of my load, till at least I had got up again, this paragon of ass-drivers gave me no help at all, however weary I might be, but beginning from my head, or rather from my ears, he thrashed all the hair off my hide with a huge stick.