hile he lay there, two immense
serpents came gliding over the floor, and opened their hideous jaws to
devour him; and he, a baby of a few months old, had griped one of the
fierce snakes in each of his little fists, and strangled them to death.
When he was but a stripling, he had killed a huge lion, almost as big as
the one whose vast and shaggy hide he now wore upon his shoulders. The
next thing that he had done was to fight a battle with an ugly sort of
monster, called a hydra, which had no less than nine heads, and
exceedingly sharp teeth in every one.

"But the dragon of the Hesperides, you know," observed one of the
damsels, "has a hundred heads!"

"Nevertheless," replied the stranger, "I would rather fight two such
dragons than a single hydra. For, as fast as I cut off a head, two
others grew in its place; and, besides, there was one of the heads that
could not possibly be killed, but kept biting as fiercely as ever, long
after it was cut off. So I was forced to bury it under a stone, where it
is doubtless alive to this very day. But the hydra's body, and its eight
other heads, will never do any further mischief."

The damsels, judging that the story was likely to last a good while, had
been preparing a repast of bread and grapes, that the stranger might
refresh himself in the intervals of his talk. They took pleasure in
helping him to this simple food; and, now and then, one of them would
put a sweet grape between her rosy lips, lest it should make him bashful
to eat alone.

The traveller proceeded to tell how he had chased a very swift stag for
a twelvemonth together, without ever stopping to take breath, and had at
last caught it by the antlers, and carried it home alive. And he had
fought with a very odd race of people, half horses and half men, and had
put them all to death, from a sense of duty, in order that their ugly
figures might never be seen any more. Besides all this, he took to
himself great credit for having cleaned out a stable.

"Do you call that a wonderful exploit?" asked one of the young maidens,
with a smile. "Any clown in the country has done as much!"

"Had it been an ordinary stable," replied the stranger, "I should not
have mentioned it. But this was so gigantic a task that it would have
taken me all my life to perform it, if I had not luckily thought of
turning the channel of a river through the stable door. That did the
business in a very short time!"

Seeing how earnestly his fai