and no sooner had this been done than the slave started running around
the room crying, "Out with the water and in with the wine!" We all paid
tribute to this joke, but Agamemnon in particular, for he well knew what
strings to pull in order to secure another invitation to dinner. Tickled
by our flattery, and mellowed by the wine, Trimalchio was just about
drunk. "Why hasn't one of you asked my Fortunata to dance?" he
demanded, "There's no one can do a better cancan, believe me," and he
himself raised his arms above his head and favored us with an
impersonation of Syrus the actor; the whole household chanting:

Oh bravo
Oh bravissimo

in chorus, and he would have danced out into the middle of the room
before us all, had not Fortunata whispered in his ear, telling him,
I suppose, that such low buffoonery was not in keeping with his dignity.
But nothing could be so changeable as his humor, for one minute he stood
in awe of Fortunata, but his natural propensities would break out the
next.




CHAPTER THE FIFTY-THIRD.

But his passion for dancing was interrupted at this stage by a
stenographer who read aloud, as if he were reading the public records,
"On the seventh of the Kalends of July, on Trimalchio's estates near
Cumae, were born thirty boys and forty girls: five hundred pecks of wheat
were taken from the threshing floors and stored in the granaries: five