, furnish you with a pair of horns shapen by the pattern of
those which she made for Actaeon. The goodly Bacchus also carries horns,
--Pan, Jupiter Ammon, with a great many others. Are they all cuckolds? If
Jove be a cuckold, Juno is a whore. This follows by the figure metalepsis:
as to call a child, in the presence of his father and mother, a bastard, or
whore's son, is tacitly and underboard no less than if he had said openly
the father is a cuckold and his wife a punk. Let our discourse come nearer
to the purpose. The horns that my wife did make me are horns of abundance,
planted and grafted in my head for the increase and shooting up of all good
things. This will I affirm for truth, upon my word, and pawn my faith and
credit both upon it. As for the rest, I will be no less joyful, frolic,
glad, cheerful, merry, jolly, and gamesome, than a well-bended tabor in the
hands of a good drummer at a nuptial feast, still making a noise, still
rolling, still buzzing and cracking. Believe me, sir, in that consisteth
none of my least good fortunes. And my wife will be jocund, feat, compt,
neat, quaint, dainty, trim, tricked up, brisk, smirk, and smug, even as a
pretty little Cornish chough. Who will not believe this, let hell or the
gallows be the burden of his Christmas carol.

I remark, quoth Pantagruel, the last point or particle which you did speak
of, and, having seriously conferred it with the first, find that at the
beginning you were delighted with the sweetness of your dream; but in the
end and final closure of it you startingly awaked, and on a sudden were
forthwith vexed in choler and annoyed. Yea, quoth Panurge, the reason of
that was because I had fasted too long. Flatter not yourself, quoth
Pantagruel; all will go to ruin. Know for a certain truth, that every
sleep that endeth with a starting, and leaves the person irksome, grieved,
and fretting, doth either signify a present evil, or otherwise presageth
and portendeth a future imminent mishap. To signify an evil, that is to
say, to show some sickness hardly curable, a kind of pestilentious or
malignant boil, botch, or sore, lying and lurking hid, occult, and latent
within the very centre of the body, which many times doth by the means of
sleep, whose nature is to reinforce and strengthen the faculty and virtue
of concoction, being according to the theorems of physic to declare itself,
and moves toward the outward superficies. At this sad stirring is