Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt: ... words. He answered, the nation of the fleas, as soon as they learned he was come on earth, had sent their ambassadors to compliment him: and there had complained to him that, though he had assigned to them the dogs' coats as a dwelling, yet on account of certain properties common to women, some poor souls went astray and trespassed on the ladies' furs; and such poor wandering creatures were by the women evil entreated, caught, and not only murdered, but first so miserably martyred and crushed between their fingers that it might move the heart of a stone. "Yea," said Jupiter further, "they did present their case to me so movingly and piteously that I must needs have sympathy with them and so promised them help, yet on condition I should first hear the women: to that they objected that if 'twas allowed to the women to plead their cause and to oppose them, they knew well they with their poisonous tongues would either impose upon my goodness and loving-kindness, and outcry the fleas themselves, or by their sweet words and their beauty would befool me and lead me astray to a wrong judgment. But if I must allow the women to hunt, catch, and with the hunters' privilege to slay them in their preserves, then their petition was that they might in future be executed in honourable wise, and either cut down with a pole-axe like oxen or snared like game, and no longer to be so scandalously crushed between the fingers and so broken on the wheel, by which means their own limbs were made instruments of torture." "Gentlemen," said I, "ye must be greatly tormented when they thus tyrannise over ye." "Yea, truly," said they, "they be so envious of us. Is it right? Can they not suffer us in their territories? for many of them so cleanse their lap-dogs with brushes, combs, soap and lye, and other like things, that we are compelled to leave our fatherland and to seek other dwellings." Thereupon I allowed them to...
