s may be the more
vively and truly prophetic, and not counterfeit by the intermixture of some
adulterate lustre and affectation. Yet whether this dumb person shall be
of the male or female sex is in your option, lieth at your discretion, and
altogether dependeth on your own election.

I would more willingly, quoth Panurge, consult with and be advised by a
dumb woman, were it not that I am afraid of two things. The first is, that
the greater part of women, whatever be that they see, do always represent
unto their fancies, think, and imagine, that it hath some relation to the
sugared entering of the goodly ithyphallos, and graffing in the cleft of
the overturned tree the quickset imp of the pin of copulation. Whatever
signs, shows, or gestures we shall make, or whatever our behaviour,
carriage, or demeanour shall happen to be in their view and presence, they
will interpret the whole in reference to the act of androgynation and the
culbutizing exercise, by which means we shall be abusively disappointed of
our designs, in regard that she will take all our signs for nothing else
but tokens and representations of our desire to entice her unto the lists
of a Cyprian combat or catsenconny skirmish. Do you remember what happened
at Rome two hundred and threescore years after the foundation thereof? A
young Roman gentleman encountering by chance, at the foot of Mount Celion,
with a beautiful Latin lady named Verona, who from her very cradle upwards
had always been both deaf and dumb, very civilly asked her, not without a
chironomatic Italianizing of his demand, with various jectigation of his
fingers and other gesticulations as yet customary amongst the speakers of
that country, what senators in her descent from the top of the hill she had
met with going up thither. For you are to conceive that he, knowing no
more of her deafness than dumbness, was ignorant of both. She in the
meantime, who neither heard nor understood so much as one word of what he
had said, straight imagined, by all that she could apprehend in the lovely
gesture of his manual signs, that what he then required of her was what
herself had a great mind to, even that which a young man doth naturally
desire of a woman. Then was it that by signs, which in all occurrences of
venereal love are incomparably more attractive, valid, and efficacious than
words, she beckoned to him to come along with her to her house; which when
he had done, she drew him aside to a pr