Pray now, good father hermit, have not you here some other pastime besides fasting?
Methinks it is somewhat of the leanest; we might well enough be without so many palace holidays and those fasting times of yours.

In my Donatus, quoth Friar John, I could find yet but three times or tenses, the preterit, the present, and the future; doubtless here the fourth ought to be a work of supererogation.
That time or tense, said Epistemon, is aorist, derived from the preter-imperfect tense of the Greeks, admitted in war ( ?) and odd cases.
Patience perforce is a remedy for a mad dog.

Saith the hermit: It is, as I told you, fatal to go against this; whosoever does it is a rank heretic, and wants nothing but fire and faggot, that's certain.

To deal plainly with you, my dear pater, cried Panurge, being at sea, I much more fear being wet than being warm, and being drowned than being burned.
Well, however, let us fast, a God's name; yet I have fasted so long that it has quite undermined my flesh, and I fear that at last the bastions of this bodily fort of mine will fall to ruin.

Besides, I am much more afraid of vexing you in this same trade of fasting; for the devil a bit I understand anything in it, and it becomes me very scurvily, as several people have told me, and I am apt to believe them.