"Lord!" quoth I low to myself, "I am come into the garden of the Hesperides surely; yet I wist not that the Dragon was mother of them." But aloud I said, "I am bound to thank you for the hospitality you extended to me, Madam, the which I cannot well repay." "I thought no less," replied the lady, without raising her eyes from her work, "and therefore made application for distraint, which being granted, I sold such stuff as you thought fit to leave and was not past laundering." "But there was my mare too," I cried. "Ay, the poor jade," said she, "the knacker put a price upon her, but it reached not to the value of a feed of oats, so I cried quits and kept her." "Then you have her yet?" quoth I. "I have her not," quoth she, "for I gave her a gift to the parson of St. Dunstan's Church that hath been very full of encouragement to us in our trouble." "Your trouble, Madam?" I began, but she proceeded with a terrible quietness-- "'A preached a singular comfortable sermon two Sundays after your stealing off, upon the text, 'Happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us,' as would have melted the most shameless, Mr. Denis." "Let us hope it did then," said I, pretty tired of this oblique attack. "He was not of the congregation, sir," she blazed out, her eyes on mine. "He was," I retorted, "for he both preached the sermon and hath my mare. But he shall give her me again, or else I will take her by force." "Ah, you would despoil the Church then, you heretick Turk!" cried the lady in a thin, hissing voice that befitted the Dragon I had formerly called her in my thoughts. "Was it not enough that you should creep into a Christian household and steal all peace therefrom? What of the looks you were ever casting upon my tender Judith, and she so apt at her catechism and forward in works of grace. Your mare, quotha! What of her pretty beseeching ways that no man hath seen but saith she is rather Ruth than Judith--ay, and shall find her Boaz one day, I tell you, in despite of your heathen wiles and treachery. So, fetch away your beast from a churchman's stall, 'tis easy done every whit as get a simple maid's heart; and then off and abroad, while she weeps at home, poor lass! that is so diligent a sempstress withal, and her father's prop of his age." Whilst she was delivering this astonishing and very calumnious speech, Madam Malt had arisen from her chair and now stood close above me, wringing her hands that yet kept a hold of her piece of needlework, and shaking with rage. She was a marvellous large woman, with a face something loose-skinned about the jaw, and of a buff colour that mounted to a brownness in the folds and wrinkles. Her voice, as I have said, was very dragonlike, and her whole aspect and presence had something of an apocalyptic terribleness that seemed to draw the clouds about her as a garment. I see her yet in my dreams and awake shuddering.