's beads are to their
girdle. In his left hand he held an old overgrown greasy foul cap, such as
your scald-pated fellows wear, and in the right a huge cabbage-stump.

As soon as he saw me he was overjoyed, and bawled out to me, What cheer,
ho? How dost like me now? Behold the true Algamana (this he said showing
me the ass's tickle-gizzard). This doctor's cap is my true elixir; and
this (continued he, shaking the cabbage-stump in his fist) is lunaria
major, you old noddy. I have 'em, old boy, I have 'em; we'll make 'em when
thou'rt come back. But pray, father, said I, whence come you? Whither are
you bound? What's your lading? Have you smelt the salt deep? To these
four questions he answered, From Queen Whims; for Touraine; alchemy; to the
very bottom.

Whom have you got o' board? said I. Said he, Astrologers, fortune-tellers,
alchemists, rhymers, poets, painters, projectors, mathematicians,
watchmakers, sing-songs, musicianers, and the devil and all of others that
are subject to Queen Whims (Motteux gives the following footnote:--'La
Quinte, This means a fantastic Humour, Maggots, or a foolish Giddiness of
Brains; and also, a fifth, or the Proportion of Five in music, &c.'). They
have very fair legible patents to show for't, as anybody may see. Panurge
had no sooner heard this but he was upon the high-rope, and began to rail
at them like mad. What o' devil d'ye mean, cried he, to sit idly here like
a pack of loitering sneaksbies, and see us stranded, while you may help us,
and tow us off into the current? A plague o' your whims! you can make all
things whatsoever, they say, so much as good weather and little children;
yet won't make haste to fasten some hawsers and cables, and get us off. I
was just coming to set you afloat, quoth Harry Cotiral; by Trismegistus,
I'll clear you in a trice. With this he caused 7,532,810 huge drums to be
unheaded on one side, and set that open side so that it faced the end of
the streamers and pendants; and having fastened them to good tacklings and
our ship's head to the stern of theirs, with cables fastened to the bits
abaft the manger in the ship's loof, they towed us off ground at one pull
so easily and pleasantly that you'd have wondered at it had you been there.
For the dub-a-dub rattling of the drums, with the soft noise of the gravel
which murmuring disputed us our way, and the merry cheers and huzzas of the
sailors, made an harmony almost as good as that of the he