the sway and authority of his sovereign government, there were sundry countries and nations much differing from one another in language, with whom, whether he was to speak unto them or give any answer to their requests, he was always necessitated to make use of divers sorts of truchman and interpreters.  Now with this man alone, sufficient for supplying all their places, will that great inconveniency hereafter be totally removed; seeing he is such a fine gesticulator, and in the practice of chirology an artist so complete, expert, and dexterous, that with his very fingers he doth speak.  Howsoever, you are to pitch upon such a dumb one as is deaf by nature and from his birth; to the end that his gestures and signs may be the more vively and truly prophetic, and not counterfeit by the intermixture of some adulterate lustre and affectation.  Yet whether this dumb person shall be of the male or female sex is in your option, lieth at your discretion, and altogether dependeth on your own election.

I would more willingly, quoth Panurge, consult with and be advised by a dumb woman, were it not that I am afraid of two things.  The first is, that the greater part of women, whatever be that they see, do always represent unto their fancies, think, and imagine, that it hath some relation to the sugared entering of the goodly ithyphallos, and graffing in the cleft of the overturned tree the quickset imp of the pin of copulation.  Whatever signs, shows, or gestures we shall make, or whatever our behaviour, carriage, or demeanour shall happen to be in their view and presence, they will interpret the whole in reference to the act of androgynation and the culbutizing exercise, by which means we shall be abusively disappointed of our designs, in regard that she will take all our 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