“Thou shalt sing psalms and canticles and thou shalt say: 

“’O sons of the Penguins, if there be among you a pure virgin, let her arise and go, armed with the sign of the cross, to combat the dragon!’”

Thus the old man spake, and Samuel promised to obey him.  The next day he girded up his loins and set out with two of his companions to proclaim to the inhabitants of Alca that a virgin alone would be able to deliver the Penguins from the rage of the dragon.

IX.  THE DRAGON OF ALCA (Continuation)

Orberosia loved her husband, but she did not love him alone.  At the hour when Venus lightens in the pale sky, whilst Kraken scattered terror through the villages, she used to visit in his moving hut, a young shepherd of Dalles called Marcel, whose pleasing form was invested with inexhaustible vigour.  The fair Orberosia shared the shepherd’s aromatic couch with delight, but far from making herself known to him, she took the name of Bridget, and said that she was the daughter of a gardener in the Bay of Divers.  When regretfully she left his arms she walked across the smoking fields towards the Coast of Shadows, and if she happened to meet some belated peasant she immediately spread out her garments like great wings and cried: 

“Passer by, lower your eyes, that you may not have to say, ’Alas! alas! woe is me, for I have seen the angel of the Lord.’”

The villagers tremblingly knelt with their faces to the round.  And several of them used to say that angels, whom it would be death to see, passed along the roads of the island in the night time.

Kraken did not know of the loves of Orberosia and Marcel, for he was a hero, and heroes never discover the secrets of their wives.  But though he did not know of these loves, he reaped the benefit of them.  Every night he found his companion more good-humoured and more beautiful, exhaling pleasure and perfuming the nuptial bed with a delicious odour of fennel and vervain.  She loved Kraken with a love that never became importunate or anxious, because she did not rest its whole weight on him alone.

This lucky infidelity of Orberosia was destined soon to save the hero from a great peril and to assure his fortune and his glory for ever.  For it happened that she saw passing in the twilight a neatherd from Belmont, who was goading on his oxen, and she fell more deeply in love with him than she had ever been with the shepherd Marcel.  He was hunch-backed; his shoulders were higher than his ears; his body was supported by legs of different lengths; his rolling eyes flashed, from beneath his matted hair.  From his throat issued a hoarse voice and strident laughter; he smelt of the cow-shed.  However, to her he was beautiful.  “A plant,” as Gnatho says, “has been loved by one, a stream by another, a beast by a third.”

Now, one day, as she was sighing within the neatherd’s arms in a village barn, suddenly the blasts of a trumpet, with sounds and footsteps, fell upon her ears; she looked through the window and saw the inhabitants collected in the marketplace round a young monk, who, standing upon a rock, uttered these words in a distinct voice: