the
roof flew off, and a great yellow dragon came down on the chapel-floor
with a flop, and danced about clumsily, wriggling his fat tail, and
saying to a sort of tune, 'O the Devil, the Devil, the Devil, O the
Devil,' so I went up to him, and put my hand on his breast, meaning to
slay him, and so awoke, and found myself standing up with my hand on the
breast of an armed knight; the door lay flat on the ground, and under it
lay Hector, our dog, whining and dying.

For eight hours I had been asleep; on awaking, the blood rushed up into
my face, I heard my mother's low mysterious song behind me, and knew not
what harm might happen to her and me, if that knight's coming made her
cease in it; so I struck him with my left hand, where his face was bare
under his mail-coif, and getting my sword in my light hand, drove its
point under his hawberk, so that it came out behind, and he fell, turned
over on his face, and died.

Then, because my mother still went on working and singing, I said no
word, but let him lie there, and put the door up again, and found Hector
dead.

I then sat down again and polished my sword with a piece of leather after
I had wiped the blood from it; and in an hour my mother arose from her
work, and raising me from where I was sitting, kissed my brow, saying,
'Well done, Lionel, you have slain our greatest foe, and now the people
will know you for what you are before you die--Ah God! though not before
_I_ die.'

So I said, 'Who is he, mother? he seems to be some Lord; am I a Lord
then?'

'A King, if the people will but know it,' she said.

Then she knelt down by the dead body, turned it round again, so that it
lay face uppermost, as before, then said:

'And so it has all come to this, has it? To think that you should run on
my son's sword-point at last, after all the wrong you have done me and
mine; now must I work carefully, least when you are dead you should still
do me harm, for that you are a King--Lionel!'

'Yea, Mother.'

'Come here and see; this is what I have wrought these many Peter's days
by day, and often other times by night.'

'It is a surcoat, Mother; for me?'

'Yea, but take a spade, and come into the wood.'

So we went, and my mother gazed about her for a while as if she were
looking for something, but then suddenly went forward with her eyes on
the ground, and she said to me:

'Is it not strange, that I who know the very place I am going to take you
to, as well as our ow