“And for silver, I more than ordinarily affect it:  I have several water-pots more or less, whereon is the story how Cassandra killed her son’s, and the dead boys are so well embossed, you’d think them real.  I have also a drinking cup left me by an advocate of mine, where Daedalus puts Niobe into the Trojan horse, as also that other of Hermerotes; that they may stand as a testimony, there’s truth in cups, and all this massy; ror will I part with what I understand of them at any rate.”

While he was thus talking, a cup dropt out of a boy’s hand; on which, Trimalchio looking over his shoulder at him, bad him begone, and kill himself immediately; “for,” said he, “thou art careless and mind’st not what thou art about.”  The boy hung his lip, and besought him; but he said, “What! dost thou beseech me, as if I required some difficult matter of thee?  I only bid thee obtain this of thy self, that thou be not careless again.”  But at last he discharged him upon our entreaty.  On this the boy run round the table and cry’d, “Water without doors, and wine within.”  We all took the jest, but more especially Agamemnon, who knew on what account himself had been brought thither.

Trimalchio in the mean time hearing himself commended, drank all the merrier, and being within an ace of quite out, “Will none of you,” said he, “invite my Fortunata to dance?  Believe me, there’s no one leads a country dance better:”  And with that, tossing his hands round his head, fell to act a jack-pudding; the family all the while singing, ‘youth it self, most exactly youth it self ;’ and he had gotten into the middle of the room, but that Fortunata whispered him, and I believe told him, such gambols did not become his gravity.  Nor was there any thing more uneven to it self; for one while he turned to his Fortunata, and another while to his natural inclination:  But what disturbed the pleasure of her dancing, was his notaries coming in; who, as they had been the acts of a common council, read aloud: 

’VII. of the Calends of August born in Trimalchio’s manner of cumanum, thirty boys and forty girls, brought from the threshing-floor into the granary, five hundred thousand bushels of wheat.  The same day broke out a fire in a pleasure-garden that was Pompey’s, first began in one of his bayliffs houses.’

“How’s this,” said Trimalchio:  “When were those gardens bought for me?” “The year before,” answered his notary, “and therefore not yet brought to account.”

At this Trimalchio fell into a fume; and “whatever lands,” said he, “shall be bought me hereafter, if I hear nothing of it in six months, let them never, I charge ye, be brought to any account of mine.”  Then also were read the orders of the clerks of the markets, and the testaments of his woodwards, rangers, and park-keepers, by which they disinherited their relations, and with ample praise of him, declare Trimalchio their heir.  Next that, the names of his bayliffs; and how one of them that made his circuits in the country, turned off his wife for having taken her in bed with a barber; the door-keeper of his baths turn’d out of his place; the auditor found short in his accounts, and the dispute between the grooms of his chamber ended.