nostrils,
a huge giant, had swallowed every individual pan, skillet, kettle,
frying-pan, dripping-pan, and brass and iron pot in the land, for want of
windmills, which were his daily food. Whence it happened that somewhat
before day, about the hour of his digestion, the greedy churl was taken
very ill with a kind of a surfeit, or crudity of stomach, occasioned, as
the physicians said, by the weakness of the concocting faculty of his
stomach, naturally disposed to digest whole windmills at a gust, yet unable
to consume perfectly the pans and skillets; though it had indeed pretty
well digested the kettles and pots, as they said they knew by the
hypostases and eneoremes of four tubs of second-hand drink which he had
evacuated at two different times that morning. They made use of divers
remedies, according to art, to give him ease; but all would not do; the
distemper prevailed over the remedies; insomuch that the famous
Wide-nostrils died that morning of so strange a death that I think you ought
no longer to wonder at that of the poet Aeschylus. It had been foretold him
by the soothsayers that he would die on a certain day by the ruin of
something that should fall on him. The fatal day being come in its turn, he
removed himself out of town, far from all houses, trees, (rocks,) or any
other things that can fall and endanger by their ruin; and strayed in a
large field, trusting himself to the open sky; there very secure, as he
thought, unless indeed the sky should happen to fall, which he held to be
impossible. Yet they say that the larks are much afraid of it; for if it
should fall, they must all be taken.

The Celts that once lived near the Rhine--they are our noble valiant
French--in ancient times were also afraid of the sky's falling; for being
asked by Alexander the Great what they feared most in this world, hoping
well they would say that they feared none but him, considering his great
achievements, they made answer that they feared nothing but the sky's
falling; however, not refusing to enter into a confederacy with so brave a
king, if you believe Strabo, lib. 7, and Arrian, lib. I.

Plutarch also, in his book of the face that appears on the body of the
moon, speaks of one Phenaces, who very much feared the moon should fall on
the earth, and pitied those that live under that planet, as the Aethiopians
and Taprobanians, if so heavy a mass ever happened to fall on them, and
would have feared the like of heaven and e