signs for nothing else
but tokens and representations of our desire to entice her unto the lists
of a Cyprian combat or catsenconny skirmish. Do you remember what happened
at Rome two hundred and threescore years after the foundation thereof? A
young Roman gentleman encountering by chance, at the foot of Mount Celion,
with a beautiful Latin lady named Verona, who from her very cradle upwards
had always been both deaf and dumb, very civilly asked her, not without a
chironomatic Italianizing of his demand, with various jectigation of his
fingers and other gesticulations as yet customary amongst the speakers of
that country, what senators in her descent from the top of the hill she had
met with going up thither. For you are to conceive that he, knowing no
more of her deafness than dumbness, was ignorant of both. She in the
meantime, who neither heard nor understood so much as one word of what he
had said, straight imagined, by all that she could apprehend in the lovely
gesture of his manual signs, that what he then required of her was what
herself had a great mind to, even that which a young man doth naturally
desire of a woman. Then was it that by signs, which in all occurrences of
venereal love are incomparably more attractive, valid, and efficacious than
words, she beckoned to him to come along with her to her house; which when
he had done, she drew him aside to a privy room, and then made a most
lively alluring sign unto him to show that the game did please her.
Whereupon, without any more advertisement, or so much as the uttering of
one word on either side, they fell to and bringuardized it lustily.

The other cause of my being averse from consulting with dumb women is, that
to our signs they would make no answer at all, but suddenly fall backwards
in a divarication posture, to intimate thereby unto us the reality of their
consent to the supposed motion of our tacit demands. Or if they should
chance to make any countersigns responsory to our propositions, they would
prove so foolish, impertinent, and ridiculous, that by them ourselves
should easily judge their thoughts to have no excursion beyond the duffling
academy. You know very well how at Brignoles, when the religious nun,
Sister Fatbum, was made big with child by the young Stiffly-stand-to't, her
pregnancy came to be known, and she cited by the abbess, and, in a full
convention of the convent, accused of incest. Her excuse was that she did
not consent the