I CALL all the powers of time and chance, which severally check us in
our careers in this world, to bear me witness, that I could never yet
get fairly to my uncle _Toby_’s amours, till this very moment, that my
mother’s _curiosity_, as she stated the affair,——or a different impulse
in her, as my father would have it——wished her to take a peep at them
through the key-hole.
“Call it, my dear, by its right name, quoth my father, and look through
the key-hole as long as you will.”
Nothing but the fermentation of that little subacid humour, which I
have often spoken of, in my father’s habit, could have vented such an
insinuation——he was however frank and generous in his nature, and at
all times open to conviction; so that he had scarce got to the last
word of this ungracious retort, when his conscience smote him.
My mother was then conjugally swinging with her left arm twisted under
his right, in such wise, that the inside of her hand rested upon the
back of his—she raised her fingers, and let them fall—it could scarce
be call’d a tap; or if it was a tap——’twould have puzzled a casuist to
say, whether ’twas a tap of remonstrance, or a tap of confession: my
father, who was all sensibilities from head to foot, class’d it
right—Conscience redoubled her blow—he turn’d his face suddenly the
other way, and my mother supposing his body was about to turn with it
in order to move homewards, by a cross movement of her right leg,
keeping her left as its centre, brought herself so far in front, that
as he turned his head, he met her eye——Confusion again! he saw a
thousand reasons to wipe out the reproach, and as many to reproach
himself——a thin, blue, chill, pellucid chrystal with all its humours so
at rest, the least mote or speck of desire might have been seen, at the
bottom of it, had it existed——it did not——and how I happen to be so
lewd myself, particularly a little before the vernal and autumnal
equinoxes——Heaven above knows——My mother——madam——was so at no time,
either by nature, by institution, or example.
A temperate current of blood ran orderly through her veins in all
months of the year, and in all critical moments both of the day and
night alike; nor did she superinduce the least heat into her humours
from the manual effervescencies of devotional tracts, which having
little or no meaning in them, nature is oft-times obliged to find
one——And as for my father’s example! ’twas so far from being either
aiding or abetting thereunto, that ’twas the whole business of his
life, to keep all fancies of that kind out of her head——Nature had done
her part, to have spared him this trouble; and what was not a little
inconsistent, my father knew it——And here am I sitting, this 12th day
of _August_ 1766, in a purple jerkin and yellow pair of slippers,
without either wig or cap on, a most tragicomical completion of his
prediction, “That I should neither think, nor act like any other man’s
child, upon that very account.”
The mistake in my father, was in attacking my mother’s motive, instead
of the act itself; for certainly key-holes were made for other
purposes; and considering the act, as an act which interfered with a
true proposition, and denied a key-hole to be what it was——it became a
violation of nature; and was so far, you see, criminal.
It is for this reason, an’ please your Reverences, That key-holes are
the occasions of more sin and wickedness, than all other holes in this
world put together.
——which leads me to my uncle _Toby_’s amours.