The Dragon Tamers

There was once an old, old castle.

It was so old that its walls and towers and turrets and gateways and arches had crumbled to ruins, and of all its old splendor, there were only two little rooms left, and it was here that John the blacksmith had set up his forge.

He was too poor to live in a proper house, and no one asked any rent for the rooms in the ruin because all the lords who had owned the castle were all long gone.

So there John blew his bellows and hammered his iron and did all the work which came his way.

This was not much because most of the trade went to the mayor of the town, who was also a blacksmith in quite a large way of business and had his huge forge facing the square of the town and had 12 apprentices all hammering like a nest of woodpeckers and 12 journeymen to order the apprentices about and a patent forge and a self-acting hammer and electric bellows and all things handsome about him.

So of course, the townspeople, whenever they wanted a horse shod or a shaft mended, went to the mayor.

John the blacksmith struggled on as best he could with a few odd jobs from travelers and strangers who did not know what a superior forge the mayor's was.

The two rooms were warm and weathertight, but not very large, so the blacksmith got into the way of keeping his old iron, his odds and ends, his logs for burning, and his tuppence worth of coal in the great dungeon down under the castle.

It was a very fine dungeon indeed, with a handsome vaulted roof and big iron rings whose staples were built into the wall, very strong and convenient for tying captives to, and at one end was a broken flight of wide steps leading down no one knew where.

Even the lords of the castle in the good old times had never known where those steps led to, but every now and then they would kick a prisoner down the steps in their lighthearted, hopeful way, and sure enough, the prisoners never came back.

The blacksmith had never dared to go beyond the seventh step, and no more have I, so I know no more than he did what was at the bottom of those stairs.

stairs.John the blacksmith had a wife and a little baby.

When his wife was not doing the housework, she used to nurse the baby and cry, remembering the happy days when she lived with her father, who kept seventeen cows and lived quite in the country, and when John used to come courting her in the summer evenings, as smart as smart, with a posy in his buttonhole.

And now John's hair was getting gray, and there was hardly ever enough to eat.

As for the baby, it cried a good deal at odd times, but at night, when its mother had settled down to sleep, it would always begin to cry, quite as a matter of course, so that she hardly got any rest at all.

This made her very tired.

The baby could make up for its bad nights during the day if it liked, but the poor mother couldn't.

So whenever she had nothing to do, she used to sit and cry because she was tired out with work and worry.

One evening, the blacksmith was busy with his forge.

He was making a goat shoe for the goat of a very rich lady who wished to see how the goat liked being shod, and also whether the shoe would come to fivepence or sevenpence before she ordered the whole set.

This was the only order John had had that week, and as he worked, his wife sat and nursed the baby, who, for a wonder, was not crying.

Presently, over the noise of the bellows and over the clank of the iron, there came another sound.

The blacksmith and his wife looked at each other.

I heard nothing, said he.

Neither did I, said she.