lovers.'--Motteux.) that hang over our heads. Psha, cried one, they are
mere trash, stark naught, o' my word; they're good for nothing.

I then went to pluck some mirobolans off of a piece of tapestry whereon
they hung, but the devil a bit I could chew or swallow 'em; and had you had
them betwixt your teeth you would have sworn they had been thrown silk;
there was no manner of savour in 'em.

One might be apt to think Heliogabalus had taken a hint from thence, to
feast those whom he had caused to fast a long time, promising them a
sumptuous, plentiful, and imperial feast after it; for all the treat used
to amount to no more than several sorts of meat in wax, marble,
earthenware, painted and figured tablecloths.

While we were looking up and down to find some more substantial food, we
heard a loud various noise, like that of paper-mills (or women bucking of
linen); so with all speed we went to the place whence the noise came, where
we found a diminutive, monstrous, misshapen old fellow, called Hearsay.
His mouth was slit up to his ears, and in it were seven tongues, each of
them cleft into seven parts. However, he chattered, tattled, and prated
with all the seven at once, of different matters, and in divers languages.

He had as many ears all over his head and the rest of his body as Argus
formerly had eyes, and was as blind as a beetle, and had the palsy in his
legs.

About him stood an innumerable number of men and women, gaping, listening,
and hearing very intensely. Among 'em I observed some who strutted like
crows in a gutter, and principally a very handsome bodied man in the face,
who held then a map of the world, and with little aphorisms compendiously
explained everything to 'em; so that those men of happy memories grew
learned in a trice, and would most fluently talk with you of a world of
prodigious things, the hundredth part of which would take up a man's whole
life to be fully known.

Among the rest they descanted with great prolixity on the pyramids and
hieroglyphics of Egypt, of the Nile, of Babylon, of the Troglodytes, the
Hymantopodes, or crump-footed nation, the Blemiae, people that wear their
heads in the middle of their breasts, the Pigmies, the Cannibals, the
Hyperborei and their mountains, the Egypanes with their goat's feet, and
the devil and all of others; every individual word of it by hearsay.

I am much mistaken if I did not see among them Herodotus, Pliny, Solinus,
Berosus, Philostratu