NOW there are such an infinitude of notes, tunes, cants, chants, airs,
looks, and accents with which the word _fiddlestick_ may be pronounced
in all such causes as this, every one of ’em impressing a sense and
meaning as different from the other, as _dirt_ from _cleanliness_—That
Casuists (for it is an affair of conscience on that score) reckon up no
less than fourteen thousand in which you may do either right or wrong.
Mrs. _Wadman_ hit upon the _fiddlestick_, which summoned up all my
uncle _Toby_’s modest blood into his cheeks—so feeling within himself
that he had somehow or other got beyond his depth, he stopt short; and
without entering further either into the pains or pleasures of
matrimony, he laid his hand upon his heart, and made an offer to take
them as they were, and share them along with her.
When my uncle _Toby_ had said this, he did not care to say it again; so
casting his eye upon the Bible which Mrs. _Wadman_ had laid upon the
table, he took it up; and popping, dear soul! upon a passage in it, of
all others the most interesting to him—which was the siege of
_Jericho_—he set himself to read it over—leaving his proposal of
marriage, as he had done his declaration of love, to work with her
after its own way. Now it wrought neither as an astringent or a
loosener; nor like opium, or bark, or mercury, or buckthorn, or any one
drug which nature had bestowed upon the world—in short, it work’d not
at all in her; and the cause of that was, that there was something
working there before——Babbler that I am! I have anticipated what it was
a dozen times; but there is fire still in the subject——allons.