I could bring forward a whole host of their intrigues, and their divers appetites and curious preferences. But I should never get me done at that rate; beside what would such tales be worth, unless the subjects were given by name and surname. But this is a thing I will not do at any price, for I desire to bring shame on no woman; and I have made profession to avoid in this my book all evil-speaking whatsoever, so that none may have aught to reproach me with on the score of scandal-mongering. However to tell my tales, suppressing the names, in this can be no harm. I do leave my readers to guess the persons intended; and many a time they will suppose it to be one, though all the while ’tis quite another. 3. Now just as we do see different sorts of wood of such different nature, that some will burn when quite green, as the ash and the beech, but others, be they as dry, old and well seasoned as you please, for instance the elm, the alder and others, do burn only as slowly and tediously as possible, while many others, following the general nature of all dry and old wood, do blaze up in their dryness and oldness so rapidly and suddenly ’tis rather a destroying and instant reducing to ashes than burning proper, so is the like true of women, whether maids, wives or widows. Some, so soon as ever they be come to the first greenness of their age, do burn so easily and well, you would say from their very mother’s womb they do draw thence an amorousness; as did the fair Laïs from her fair mother Tymandra, that most famous harlot, and an hundred thousand others which herein do take after the good whores their mothers. Nay! sometimes they do not so much as wait for the age of maturity, that may be put at twelve or thirteen, to begin loving, but are at it sooner yet. This happened not twelve years agone at Paris to a pastry-cook’s child, which was discovered to be pregnant at nine years of age.[93] The girl being very sick with her pregnancy, and her father having taken a specimen of her urine to a physician, the latter said at once she had no other sickness but only that she was with child. “What!” cried the father; “Why, Sir! my daughter is only nine years old.” Who so astonished as the doctor? “’Tis all one,” said he; “of a surety, she is with child.” And after examining her more closely, he did indeed find her so. The child afterward confessing with whom she had had to do, her gallant was condemned to death by the judges, for having gone with her at so very tender an age. I much regret I have come to give this example and mention the thing here, seeing I had made up my mind not to sully my paper with suchlike mean folk, but to deal only with great and well-born persons. Herein I have somewhat gone wide of my purpose, but the story being so rare and uncommon, I must e’en be excused.