THESE attacks of Mrs. _Wadman_, you will readily conceive to be of
different kinds; varying from each other, like the attacks which
history is full of, and from the same reasons. A general looker-on
would scarce allow them to be attacks at all——or if he did, would
confound them all together——but I write not to them: it will be time
enough to be a little more exact in my descriptions of them, as I come
up to them, which will not be for some chapters; having nothing more to
add in this, but that in a bundle of original papers and drawings which
my father took care to roll up by themselves, there is a plan of
_Bouchain_ in perfect preservation (and shall be kept so, whilst I have
power to preserve any thing), upon the lower corner of which, on the
right hand side, there is still remaining the marks of a snuffy finger
and thumb, which there is all the reason in the world to imagine, were
Mrs. _Wadman_’s; for the opposite side of the margin, which I suppose
to have been my uncle _Toby_’s, is absolutely clean: This seems an
authenticated record of one of these attacks; for there are vestigia of
the two punctures partly grown up, but still visible on the opposite
corner of the map, which are unquestionably the very holes, through
which it has been pricked up in the sentry-box——
By all that is priestly! I value this precious relick, with its
_stigmata_ and pricks, more than all the relicks of the _Romish_
church——always excepting, when I am writing upon these matters, the
pricks which entered the flesh of St. _Radagunda_ in the desert, which
in your road from FESSE to CLUNY, the nuns of that name will shew you
for love.