（外文电子版资料）Smith, Clark Ashton - Mother of Toads (edited).doc

Mother of Toads Clark Ashton Smith Weird Tales Edited Version Why must you always hurry away, my little one? The voice of Mere Antoinette, the witch, was an amorous croaking. She ogled Pierre, the apothecarys young apprentice, with eyes full-orbed and unblinking as those of a toad. The folds beneath her chin swelled like the throat of some great batrachian. Her short flat fingers, outspread on her soiled apron, revealed an appearance as of narrow webs between their first flanges. Pierre Baudin, as usual, gave no answer but turned his eyes from M?egrave;re Antoinette with an air of impatience. Her voice, raucously coaxing, persisted: Stay awhile tonight, my pretty orphan. No one will miss you in the village. And your master will not mind. Pierre tossed his head with the disdain of a young Adonis. The witch was more than twice his age, and her charms were too uncouth and unsavory to tempt him for an instant. She was repellently fat and lumpish, and her skin possessed an unwholesome pallor. Also, her repute was such as to have nullified the attractions of a younger and fairer sorceress. Her witchcraft had made her feared among the peasantry of that remote province, where belief in spells and philters was still common. The people of Averoigne called her La Mère des Crapauds, Mother of Toads, a name given for more than one reason. Toads swarmed innumerably about her hut; they were said to be her familiars, and dark tales were told concerning their relationship to the sorceress, and the duties they performed at her bidding. Such tales were all the more readily believed because of those batrachian features that had always been remarked in her aspect. The youth disliked her, even as he disliked the sluggish, abnormally large toads on which he had sometimes trodden in the dusk, upon the path between her hut and the village of Les Hiboux. He could hear some of these creatures croaking now; and it seemed, weirdly, that they uttered half-articulate echoes of the witchs words