y wife will be jocund, feat, compt,
neat, quaint, dainty, trim, tricked up, brisk, smirk, and smug, even as a
pretty little Cornish chough. Who will not believe this, let hell or the
gallows be the burden of his Christmas carol.

I remark, quoth Pantagruel, the last point or particle which you did speak
of, and, having seriously conferred it with the first, find that at the
beginning you were delighted with the sweetness of your dream; but in the
end and final closure of it you startingly awaked, and on a sudden were
forthwith vexed in choler and annoyed. Yea, quoth Panurge, the reason of
that was because I had fasted too long. Flatter not yourself, quoth
Pantagruel; all will go to ruin. Know for a certain truth, that every
sleep that endeth with a starting, and leaves the person irksome, grieved,
and fretting, doth either signify a present evil, or otherwise presageth
and portendeth a future imminent mishap. To signify an evil, that is to
say, to show some sickness hardly curable, a kind of pestilentious or
malignant boil, botch, or sore, lying and lurking hid, occult, and latent
within the very centre of the body, which many times doth by the means of
sleep, whose nature is to reinforce and strengthen the faculty and virtue
of concoction, being according to the theorems of physic to declare itself,
and moves toward the outward superficies. At this sad stirring is the
sleeper's rest and ease disturbed and broken, whereof the first feeling and
stinging smart admonisheth that he must patiently endure great pain and
trouble, and thereunto provide some remedy; as when we say proverbially, to
incense hornets, to move a stinking puddle, and to awake a sleeping lion,
instead of these more usual expressions, and of a more familiar and plain
meaning, to provoke angry persons, to make a thing the worse by meddling
with it, and to irritate a testy choleric man when he is at quiet. On the
other part, to presage or foretell an evil, especially in what concerneth
the exploits of the soul in matter of somnial divinations, is as much to
say as that it giveth us to understand that some dismal fortune or
mischance is destinated and prepared for us, which shortly will not fail to
come to pass. A clear and evident example hereof is to be found in the
dream and dreadful awaking of Hecuba, as likewise in that of Eurydice, the
wife of Orpheus, neither of which was (no) sooner finished, saith Ennius,
but that incontinently thereafter th