"Even with spade in hand he'll tell the terms On which peace was concluded: all these things The cursed fellow walks about and pries into." Sec. VIII. But curious people shun the country as stale and dull and too quiet, and push into warehouses and markets and harbours, asking, "Any news? Were you not in the market in the forenoon?" and sometimes receiving for answer, "What then? Do you think things in the town change every three hours?" Notwithstanding if anyone brings any news, he'll get off his horse, and embrace him, and kiss him, and stand to listen. If however the person who meets him says he has no news, he will say somewhat peevishly, "No news, Sir? Have you not been in the market? Did you not pass by the officers' quarters? Did you exchange no words with those that have just arrived from Italy?" To stop such people the Locrian authorities had an excellent rule; they fined everyone coming from abroad who asked what the news was. For as cooks pray for plenty of meat, and fishmongers for shoals of fish, so curious people pray for shoals of trouble, and plenty of business, and innovations and changes, that they may have something to hunt after and tittle-tattle about. Well also was it in _Charondas_, the legislator of the people of Thurii,[619] to forbid any of the citizens but adulterers and curious persons to be ridiculed on the stage. Adultery itself indeed seems to be only the fruit of curiosity about another man's pleasures, and an inquiring and prying into things kept close and hidden from the world; while curiosity is a tampering with and seduction of and revealing the nakedness of secrets.[620]