I do wonder that these women which be so hot and keen to marry again, and at the same time so stricken in years, do not for their credit’s sake make some use of cooling remedies and antiphlogistic potions, so as to drive out all these heated humours. Yet so far be they from any wish to use the like, as that they do employ the very opposite treatment, declaring suchlike cooling boluses would ruin their stomach. I have seen and read a little old-fashioned tract in Italian, but a silly book withal, which did undertake to give recipes against lasciviousness, and cited some two and thirty. But these be all so silly I recommend not women to use them, nor to submit themselves to any such annoying regimen. And so I have not thought good to copy them in here. Pliny doth adduce one, which in former days the Vestal virgins were used to employ; the Athenian dames did resort to the same remedy during the festivals of the goddess Ceres, known as the _Thesmophoria_, to cool their humours thereby and take away all hot appetite of concupiscence. ’Twas to sleep on mattresses of the leaves of a tree called the _agnus castus_. But be sure, an if during the feast they did mortify themselves in this wise, after the same was over, they did very soon pitch their mattresses to the winds. I have seen a tree of the sort at a house in Guienne belonging to a very high-born, honourable and beautiful lady. She would oft times show the tree to strangers which came thither as a great rarity, and tell them its peculiar property. But devil take me if ever I have seen or heard tell of woman or dame that hath sent to gather one single branch, or made the smallest scrap of mattress from its leaves. Certainly not the lady that owned the said tree, who might have made what use she pleased thereof. Truly, it had been a pity an if she had, and her husband had not been best pleased; for so fair and charming a dame was she, ’twas only right nature should be allowed her way, and she hath borne to boot a noble line of offspring. 10.