on a sudden some small rain, which lays our wind, and so robs us
of it. Thus many a meal's lost for want of meat.

Just so, quoth Panurge, Jenin Toss-pot of Quinquenais, evacuating some wine
of his own burning on his wife's posteriors, laid the ill-fumed wind that
blowed out of their centre as out of some magisterial Aeolipile. Here is a
kind of a whim on that subject which I made formerly:

One evening when Toss-pot had been at his butts,
And Joan his fat spouse crammed with turnips her guts,
Together they pigged, nor did drink so besot him
But he did what was done when his daddy begot him.
Now when to recruit he'd fain have been snoring,
Joan's back-door was filthily puffing and roaring;
So for spite he bepissed her, and quickly did find
That a very small rain lays a very high wind.

We are also plagued yearly with a very great calamity, cried the mayor; for
a giant called Wide-nostrils, who lives in the island of Tohu, comes hither
every spring to purge, by the advice of his physicians, and swallows us,
like so many pills, a great number of windmills, and of bellows also, at
which his mouth waters exceedingly.

Now this is a sad mortification to us here, who are fain to fast over three
or four whole Lents every year for this, besides certain petty Lents, ember
weeks, and other orison and starving tides. And have you no remedy for
this? asked Pantagruel. By the advice of our Mezarims, replied the mayor,
about the time that he uses to give us a visit, we garrison our windmills
with good store of cocks and hens. The first time that the greedy thief
swallowed them, they had like to have done his business at once; for they
crowed and cackled in his maw, and fluttered up and down athwart and along
in his stomach, which threw the glutton into a lipothymy cardiac passion
and dreadful and dangerous convulsions, as if some serpent, creeping in at
his mouth, had been frisking in his stomach.

Here is a comparative as altogether incongruous and impertinent, cried
Friar John, interrupting them; for I have formerly heard that if a serpent
chance to get into a man's stomach it will not do him the least hurt, but
will immediately get out if you do but hang the patient by the heels and
lay a panful of warm milk near his mouth. You were told this, said
Pantagruel, and so were those who gave you this account; but none ever saw
or read of such a cure. On the contrary, Hippocrates, in his fifth book of
Epidem