{109}
They Know, Also, What Is Transpiring At A Distant Place, By A
Wonderful Art, And A Prophetic Kind Of Spirit.
They declare, also,
by means of signs, the undoubted symptoms of approaching peace and
war, murders and fires, domestic adulteries, the state of the king,
his life and death.
It happened in our time, that a man of those
parts, whose name was William Mangunel, a person of high rank, and
excelling all others in the aforesaid art, had a wife big with child
by her own husband's grandson. Well aware of the fact, he ordered a
ram from his own flock to be sent to his wife, as a present from her
neighbour, which was carried to the cook, and dressed. At dinner,
the husband purposely gave the shoulder-bone of the ram, properly
cleaned, to his wife, who was also well skilled in this art, for her
examination; when, having for a short time examined the secret
marks, she smiled, and threw the oracle down on the table. Her
husband, dissembling, earnestly demanded the cause of her smiling,
and the explanation of the matter. Overcome by his entreaties, she
answered: "The man to whose fold this ram belongs, has an
adulterous wife, at this time pregnant by the commission of incest
with his own grandson." The husband, with a sorrowful and dejected
countenance, replied: "You deliver, indeed, an oracle supported by
too much truth, which I have so much more reason to lament, as the
ignominy you have published redounds to my own injury." The woman,
thus detected, and unable to dissemble her confusion, betrayed the
inward feelings of her mind by external signs; shame and sorrow
urging her by turns, and manifesting themselves, now by blushes, now
by paleness, and lastly (according to the custom of women), by
tears.
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