After a while Lamme came back to the cart, great drops of sweat
pouring off him, and he, puffing and blowing like a dolphin.
"Alas!" he cried, "I was born under an evil star. For no sooner had
I run and caught up with this woman than I found that she was not a
woman at all, but an old hag rather, as indeed I could see at once
by her face--forty-five years old at the very least! And to judge by
her head-gear she had never been married. For all that, she inquired
of me in a harsh voice what I was doing there, carrying my great fat
belly about in the clover! I told her as politely as I could that I
was looking for my wife who had lately left me, and that I had run
after her by mistake.
"At that the old girl told me that the only thing for me to do was
to return at once whence I came, and that if my wife had left me she
had indeed done well, seeing that all men are thieves and rascals,
heretics, unfaithful, poisoners, and deceivers of women; and she
threatened to set her dog on me if I did not make off at once. Which
in truth I did incontinently, for that I perceived a great mastiff
lying there growling at her feet. When, therefore, I had reached the
boundary of the field, I sat me down to rest myself and to eat a bit
of ham. And I was between two clover-fields. Suddenly I heard a great
noise just behind me, and turning round I saw the old girl's mastiff,
no longer now in menacing mood but wagging his tail as sweetly as
possible and as much as to say that he was hungry and would like a
piece of my ham. I was for throwing him some small bits when all at
once his mistress appeared on the scene, and shouted out fiercely:
"'Seize the man! Seize him with your fangs, my son!'
"I started to run away, the great mastiff hanging on to me by my
breeks. And now he had bitten off a piece of them, together with
a gobbet of my own flesh. The pain made me angry and I turned and
gave him such a smart stroke with my stick upon his front paws
that I must have broken one of them at least. At that he fell down,
crying out in his dog language: 'Mercy! Mercy!' the which I granted
him. Meanwhile his mistress, finding no stones to throw at me, had
begun to threaten me with pieces of earth and bits of grass. So I
made good my retreat. And is it not a sorry thing, and a thing most
unjust and most cruel, that because a girl has not been good-looking
enough to find some one to marry her, she must needs go and take her
revenge on a poor innocent like me?"