o taste your wine? I can
see nothing among you but parchment, ink-horns, and pens. We live on
nothing else, returned Double-fee; and all who live in this place must come
through my hands. How, quoth Panurge, are you a shaver, then? Do you
fleece 'em? Ay, ay, their purse, answered Double-fee; nothing else. By
the foot of Pharaoh, cried Panurge, the devil a sou will you get of me.
However, sweet sir, be so kind as to show an honest man the way to those
Apedefers, or ignorant people, for I come from the land of the learned,
where I did not learn over much.

Still talking on, they got to the island of the Apedefers, for they were
soon got over the ford. Pantagruel was not a little taken up with admiring
the structure and habitation of the people of the place. For they live in
a swingeing wine-press, fifty steps up to it. You must know there are some
of all sorts, little, great, private, middle-sized, and so forth. You go
through a large peristyle, alias a long entry set about with pillars, in
which you see, in a kind of landscape, the ruins of almost the whole world,
besides so many great robbers' gibbets, so many gallows and racks, that
'tis enough to fright you out of your seven senses. Double-fee perceiving
that Pantagruel was taken up with contemplating those things, Let us go
further, sir, said he to him; all this is nothing yet. Nothing, quotha,
cried Friar John; by the soul of my overheated codpiece, friend Panurge and
I here shake and quiver for mere hunger. I had rather be drinking than
staring at these ruins. Pray come along, sir, said Double-fee. He then
led us into a little wine-press that lay backwards in a blind corner, and
was called Pithies in the language of the country. You need not ask
whether Master John and Panurge made much of their sweet selves there; it
is enough that I tell you there was no want of Bolognia sausages, turkey
poots, capons, bustards, malmsey, and all other sorts of good belly-timber,
very well dressed.

A pimping son of ten fathers, who, for want of a better, did the office of
a butler, seeing that Friar John had cast a sheep's eye at a choice bottle
that stood near a cupboard by itself, at some distance from the rest of the
bottellic magazine, like a jack-in-an-office said to Pantagruel, Sir, I
perceive that one of your men here is making love to this bottle. He ogles
it, and would fain caress it; but I beg that none offer to meddle with it;
for it is reserved for th