but no sooner was his hand on the hilt, but his senses were opprest with a somniferous sleep, that it was impossible for him to awake till the enchantment was finished, which afterwards was performed by St. George, whose exploits we now come to relate.
Seven times had the world’s bright eye run his annual course thro’ the twelve signs of the Zodiac, since St. George was confined in that nasty Persian prison, by the treachery of the King of Morocco, when by chance stumbling upon a bar of iron, he made such use of it, that with continual labour he digged himself a passage through ground; till, in the dead time of the night, he ascended just in the middle of the Sultan’s court: time and place thus favouring his designs, he ceased not to lend his assisting arms, to work out the rest; for, hearing some grooms in the Sultan’s stable, preparing their horses to go on hunting the next day, he took the bar of iron and killed them all: which being done, he took the strongest gelding, and richest caparisons, wherewith he bravely furnished himself, then, with chalk upon a black marble pillar, he thus wrote,
Sultan, farewel, for George is fled,
Thy steed is lost, thy grooms are dead.
So setting forward towards the gate, he thus salutes the porter, ‘Porter, open the gates with speed, for George of England is escaped out of prison, and hath murdered all the Sultan’s grooms, which has alarmed the whole court.’ The porter, ignorant of what had happened, opened the gate for St. George, who, with a nimble pace, never rested till he was within the confines of Greece, beyond the reach of the Persian. horsemen, who in vain pursued after. But now, hunger again oppressed him as sharp as imprisonment did before, so that several days his horse and he fared alike, being forced to eat the grass of the field, and to drink the water of the running streams; at last he espied a castle not far off, whether he directed his weary steps, desiring of a lady who stood looking over
