“The fire-dragon was grimly terrible with his many colors, burned by the flames; he was fifty feet long in the place where he lay.”
—from Beowulf, prose translation by E. Talbot Donaldson, 1966. This reminds me, Lindsay’s wire-haired fox terriers caught and eviscerated a huge rat last night!
By the way, that “large rat” was a small possum. And it’s stinkin’ up the neighborhood now!