It wasn’t long till Arthur heard the great voice of the giant. As he came toward the castle the bottom of the forest was rising to the top, and the top of the forest was going to the bottom. In front of the giant went a shaggy goat, and another behind him. In his hand was a club with a yellow flea on the end of it; on one shoulder he carried a dead hag, and on the other a great hog of a wild boar.
“Fu fa my beard!” cried the giant. “I catch the smell of a lying rogue from Erin, too big for one bite and too small for two. I don’t know whether to blow him away through the air, or put him under my feet.”
“You filthy giant, ’tis not to give satisfaction to you, or the like of you, that I came, but to knock satisfaction out of you.”
“I want only time till morning to give you what you came for,” said the giant.
It was daybreak when Arthur was up and struck the pole of combat. There wasn’t a calf, kid, lamb, foal, or child awaiting birth that didn’t turn five times to the right and five times to the left from the strength of the blow.
“What do you want?” asked the answering man.
“Seven hundred against me, and then seven hundred to every hundred of these, till I find the man who can put me down.”
“You fool of the world, it would be better for you to hide under a leaf than to stand before the giant.”
The giant came out to Arthur; and the two went at each other like two lions of the desert or two bulls of great growth, and fought with rage. They made the softest places hardest, and the hardest places softest; they brought spring wells up through dry slate rocks, and great tufts of green rushes through their own shoe-strings. The wounds that they made on each other were so great that little birds flew through them, and men of small growth could crawl through on their hands and knees.
It was dark and the end of the day, when Arthur cried out, “It is a bad thing for me, filthy giant, to have a fine day spent on you!”