I WISH my uncle _Toby_ had been a water-drinker; for then the thing had
been accounted for, That the first moment Widow _Wadman_ saw him, she
felt something stirring within her in his favour—Something!—something.
—Something perhaps more than friendship—less than love—something—no
matter what—no matter where—I would not give a single hair off my
mule’s tail, and be obliged to pluck it off myself (indeed the villain
has not many to spare, and is not a little vicious into the bargain),
to be let by your worships into the secret——
But the truth is, my uncle _Toby_ was not a water-drinker; he drank it
neither pure nor mix’d, or any how, or any where, except fortuitously
upon some advanced posts, where better liquor was not to be had——or
during the time he was under cure; when the surgeon telling him it
would extend the fibres, and bring them sooner into contact——my uncle
_Toby_ drank it for quietness sake.
Now as all the world knows, that no effect in nature can be produced
without a cause, and as it is as well known, that my uncle _Toby_ was
neither a weaver—a gardener, or a gladiator——unless as a captain, you
will needs have him one—but then he was only a captain of foot—and
besides, the whole is an equivocation——There is nothing left for us to
suppose, but that my uncle _Toby_’s leg——but that will avail us little
in the present hypothesis, unless it had proceeded from some ailment
_in the foot_—whereas his leg was not emaciated from any disorder in
his foot—for my uncle _Toby_’s leg was not emaciated at all. It was a
little stiff and awkward, from a total disuse of it, for the three
years he lay confined at my father’s house in town; but it was plump
and muscular, and in all other respects as good and promising a leg as
the other.
I declare, I do not recollect any one opinion or passage of my life,
where my understanding was more at a loss to make ends meet, and
torture the chapter I had been writing, to the service of the chapter
following it, than in the present case: one would think I took a
pleasure in running into difficulties of this kind, merely to make
fresh experiments of getting out of ’em——Inconsiderate soul that thou
art! What! are not the unavoidable distresses with which, as an author
and a man, thou art hemm’d in on every side of thee——are they,
_Tristram_, not sufficient, but thou must entangle thyself still more?
Is it not enough that thou art in debt, and that thou hast ten
cart-loads of thy fifth and sixth volumes[39] still—still unsold, and
art almost at thy wit’s ends, how to get them off thy hands?
To this hour art thou not tormented with the vile asthma that thou
gattest in skating against the wind in _Flanders?_ and is it but two
months ago, that in a fit of laughter, on seeing a cardinal make water
like a quirister (with both hands) thou brakest a vessel in thy lungs,
whereby, in two hours, thou lost as many quarts of blood; and hadst
thou lost as much more, did not the faculty tell thee——it would have
amounted to a gallon?——
[39] Alluding to the first edition.