d, without bathing, Tabian milk, dropax, alias depilatory, or other
such medicaments, only turning the consumptive for three months into monks;
and he assured me that if they did not grow fat and plump in a monastic way
of living, they never would be fattened in this world, either by nature or
by art.

I saw another surrounded with a crowd of two sorts of women. Some were
young, quaint, clever, neat, pretty, juicy, tight, brisk, buxom, proper,
kind-hearted, and as right as my leg, to any man's thinking. The rest were
old, weather-beaten, over-ridden, toothless, blear-eyed, tough, wrinkled,
shrivelled, tawny, mouldy, phthisicky, decrepit hags, beldams, and walking
carcasses. We were told that his office was to cast anew those she-pieces
of antiquity, and make them such as the pretty creatures whom we saw, who
had been made young again that day, recovering at once the beauty, shape,
size, and disposition which they enjoyed at sixteen; except their heels,
that were now much shorter than in their former youth.

This made them yet more apt to fall backwards whenever any man happened to
touch 'em, than they had been before. As for their counterparts, the old
mother-scratch-tobies, they most devoutly waited for the blessed hour when
the batch that was in the oven was to be drawn, that they might have their
turns, and in a mighty haste they were pulling and hauling the man like
mad, telling him that 'tis the most grievous and intolerable thing in
nature for the tail to be on fire and the head to scare away those who
should quench it.

The officer had his hands full, never wanting patients; neither did his
place bring him in little, you may swear. Pantagruel asked him whether he
could also make old men young again. He said he could not. But the way to
make them new men was to get 'em to cohabit with a new-cast female; for
this they caught that fifth kind of crinckams, which some call pellade, in
Greek, ophiasis, that makes them cast off their old hair and skin, just as
the serpents do, and thus their youth is renewed like the Arabian
phoenix's. This is the true fountain of youth, for there the old and
decrepit become young, active, and lusty.

Just so, as Euripides tells us, Iolaus was transmogrified; and thus Phaon,
for whom kind-hearted Sappho run wild, grew young again, for Venus's use;
so Tithon by Aurora's means; so Aeson by Medea, and Jason also, who, if
you'll believe Pherecides and Simonides, was new-vamped and