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shall not enlarge farther upon this particular.
But another discovery for which he was much renowned was his famous
universal pickle. For having remarked how your common pickle in use
among housewives was of no farther benefit than to preserve dead
flesh and certain kinds of vegetables, Peter with great cost as well
as art had contrived a pickle proper for houses, gardens, towns,
men, women, children, and cattle, wherein he could preserve them as
sound as insects in amber. Now this pickle to the taste, the smell,
and the sight, appeared exactly the same with what is in common
service for beef, and butter, and herrings (and has been often that
way applied with great success), but for its may sovereign virtues
was quite a different thing. For Peter would put in a certain
quantity of his powder pimperlim-pimp, after which it never failed
of success. The operation was performed by spargefaction in a
proper time of the moon. The patient who was to be pickled, if it
were a house, would infallibly be preserved from all spiders, rats,
and weasels; if the party affected were a dog, he should be exempt
from mange, and madness, and hunger. It also infallibly took away
all scabs and lice, and scalled heads from children, never hindering
the patient from any duty, either at bed or board.
But of all Peter's rarities, he most valued a certain set of bulls,
whose race was by great fortune preserved in a lineal descent from
those that guarded the golden-fleece. Though some who pretended to
observe them curiously doubted the breed had not been kept entirely
chaste, because they had degenerated from their ancestors in some
qualities, and had acquired others very extraordinary, but a foreign
mixture. The bulls of Colchis are recorded to have brazen feet; but
whether it happened by ill pasture and running, by an alloy from
intervention of other parents from stolen intrigues; whether a
weakness in their progenitors had impaired the seminal virtue, or by
a decline necessary through a long course of time, the originals of
nature being depraved in these latter sinful ages of the world--
whatever was the cause, it is certain that Lord Peter's bulls were
extremely vitiated by the rust of time in the metal of their feet,
which was now sunk into common lead. However, the terrible roaring
peculiar to their lineage was preserved, as likewise that faculty of
breathing out fire from their nostrils; which notwithstanding many
of their detractors took to be a feat of art, and to be nothing so
terrible as it appeared, proceeding only from their usual course of
diet, which was of squibs and crackers. However, they had two
peculiar marks which extremely distinguished them from the bulls of
Jason, and which I have not met together in the description of any
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