barleycorn or two upon each of these so disposed letters, I durst
promise upon my faith and honesty that, if a young virgin cock be permitted
to range alongst and athwart them, he should only eat the grains which are
set and placed upon these letters, A. C.U.C.K.O.L.D. T.H.O.U. S.H.A.L.T.
B.E. And that as fatidically as, under the Emperor Valens, most
perplexedly desirous to know the name of him who should be his successor to
the empire, the cock vacticinating and alectryomantic ate up the pickles
that were posited on the letters T.H.E.O.D. Or, for the more certainty,
will you have a trial of your fortune by the art of aruspiciny, by augury,
or by extispiciny? By turdispiciny, quoth Panurge. Or yet by the mystery
of necromancy? I will, if you please, suddenly set up again and revive
someone lately deceased, as Apollonius of Tyane did to Achilles, and the
Pythoness in the presence of Saul; which body, so raised up and
requickened, will tell us the sum of all you shall require of him: no more
nor less than, at the invocation of Erictho, a certain defunct person
foretold to Pompey the whole progress and issue of the fatal battle fought
in the Pharsalian fields. Or, if you be afraid of the dead, as commonly
all cuckolds are, I will make use of the faculty of sciomancy.

Go, get thee gone, quoth Panurge, thou frantic ass, to the devil, and be
buggered, filthy Bardachio that thou art, by some Albanian, for a
steeple-crowned hat. Why the devil didst not thou counsel me as well to
hold an emerald or the stone of a hyaena under my tongue, or to furnish and
provide myself with tongues of whoops, and hearts of green frogs, or to eat
of the liver and milt of some dragon, to the end that by those means I
might, at the chanting and chirping of swans and other fowls, understand the
substance of my future lot and destiny, as did of old the Arabians in the
country of Mesopotamia? Fifteen brace of devils seize upon the body and
soul of this horned renegado, miscreant cuckold, the enchanter, witch, and
sorcerer of Antichrist to all the devils of hell! Let us return towards our
king. I am sure he will not be well pleased with us if he once come to get
notice that we have been in the kennel of this muffled devil. I repent my
being come hither. I would willingly dispense with a hundred nobles and
fourteen yeomans, on condition that he who not long since did blow in the
bottom of my breeches should instantly with his squirting spitt