"Everything, dear snip. You must surely understand it is most important for one in my position to avoid in any way offending the sensibilities of the Philistines."
"Still, Manuel, the Philistines themselves have babies, and I do not see how they could have conceivably objected to my having at any rate a very small one if only you had made me right—"
"Not at all! nobody objects to the baby in itself, now that you are a married woman. The point is that the babies of the Philistines are brought to them by the stork; and that even an allusion to the possibility of misguided persons obtaining a baby in any other way these Philistines consider to be offensive and lewd and lascivious and obscene."
"Why, how droll of them! But are you sure of that, Manuel!"
"All their best-thought-of and most popular writers, my dear, are unanimous upon the point; and their Seranim have passed any number of laws, their oil-merchants have founded a guild, especially to prosecute such references. No, there is, to be sure, a dwindling sect which favors putting up with what babies you may find in the cabbage patch, but all really self-respecting people when in need of offspring arrange to be visited by the stork."
"It is certainly a remarkable custom, but it sounds convenient if you can manage it," said Niafer. "What I want is the baby, though, and of course we must try to get the baby in the manner of the Philistines, if you know that manner, for I am sure I have no wish to offend anybody."
So Manuel prepared to get a baby in the manner preferred by the Philistines. He performed the suitable incantation, putting this and that together in the manner formerly employed by the Thessalian witches and sorcerers, and he cried aloud a very ancient if indecent charm from the old Latin, saying, as Queen Stultitia had told him to say, without any mock-modest mincing of words:
Dictum est antiqua sandalio mulier habitavit,
Quae multos pueros habuit tum ut potuit nullum
Quod faciundum erat cognoscere. Sic Domina Anser.