It was very hot in the market-place. The sun blazed from a cloudless sky like a globe of molten brass. The houses on each side of the square threw a hard and narrow rim of shadow upon the pavement, above the scorched cobbles of which heat ceaselessly vibrated in waves. A couple of dogs lay panting under the market cross with glazed eyes, and dripping, projected tongues. The open market-place was well-nigh deserted, for folk could not cheapen and bargain with the fierce sunlight beating on the napes of their necks, and so had taken shelter from the sweltering heat in the neighbouring hostelries and canvas ale-booths. Only in the little patch of shade cast by the ‘Three Arrows’ stood a small group of hucksters selling petty wares. There was a fellow with bright-coloured ribbons and gloves, whose parched tongue had long since refused to perform its office; there was another with damsons and little green apples, whose thirst had driven him to devour almost as much as he had sold; there was an old woman fallen uneasily asleep upon the handle of a corded-in basket wherein half a dozen pullets clucked and struggled wearily; there was a chapman with a priceless elixir for Saint Antony’s fire, who sucked greedily at an empty tankard; there was an old man with a great green leaf on his head, sitting with closed eyes and clasped hands upon his basket of peascods; and there among the rest was Meg of Four Lane Ends, a fierce and uncouth figure, standing with arms akimbo and a sack of corn at her feet. Meg was a good six foot high, with broad hips and shoulders, and an arm and fist like a blacksmith’s. She might have been one of those Amazons who, the learned say, are shut up in the North with Gog and Magog, whence they will come with terror and woe and destruction at the dreadful Doomsday. ‘God help the man she taketh to husband,’ folk were wont to say; but lo how the Lord in His Providence provides--she married Gilbert of the Four Lane Ends, a somewhat stern albeit a kindly man, and one who could knock down an ox with one blow of his fist. Her red hair straggled in wisps across her freckled face, her nostrils quivered like a mettled horse’s, as she snuffed up the hot air, and her thin lips twitched and puckered nervously at the corners. Her steel-blue eyes now rested on the corn-sack at her feet and now roved wearily round the market-place, searching for possible customers. She had carried the corn on her back five long miles that morning; there were three good bushels of it, and no one had offered her more than twelvepence the bushel for it, a malison on them. She saw John the Miller come slowly across the market-place. She moistened her parched, black lips with her tongue and cried out to him in a cracked voice, ‘Dost lack any corn, John Miller?’ He came across to her and, opening the sack, plunged his hand into the corn, running the grain through his fingers and feeling it between his finger and thumb.