You'll not know the sooner,' quoth Slawkenbergius, for interrupting me.' I have nothing, good lady, but empty bottles,' says the ass. - I'm loaded with tripes,'-says the second. -And thou art little better, quoth she to the third; for nothing is there in thy panniers but trunkhose and pantoufles ;-and, so to the fourth and fifth, going on, one by one, through the whole string, till coming to the ass which carries it, she turns the pannier upside down,-looks at it,-considers it,-samples it,-measures it,--stretches it, wets it, dries it, -then takes her teeth both to the warp and the weft of it. 4 Of what? for the love of Christ! -I am determined, answered Slawkenbergius, that all the powers upon earth shall never wring that secret from my breast. CHAPTER CCCI. We live in a world beset on all sides with mysteries and riddles,—and so 'tis no matter; else it seems strange, that Nature, who makes every thing so wellto answer its destination, and seldom or never errs, unless for pastime, in giving such forms and aptitudes to whatever passes through her hands, that, whether she designs for the plough, the caravan, the cart,—or whatever other creature she models, be it but an ass's foal, you are sure to have the thing you wanted; and yet, at the same time, should so eternally bungle it as she does, in making so simple a thing as a married man. Whether it is in the choice of the clay,- -or that it is frequently spoiled in the baking (by an excess of which a husband may turn out too crusty, you know, on one hand, or not enough so through defect of heat, on the other); or whether this great artificer is not so attentive to the little Platonic exigences of that part of the species, for whose use she is fabricating this;—or that her ladyship sometimes scarce knows what sort of a husband will do,-I know not: we will discourse about it after supper. It is enough, that neither the observation itself, nor the reasoning upon it, are at all to the purpose,—but rather against it; since, with regard to my uncle Toby's fitness for the marriage state, nothing was ever better: she had formed him of the best and kindliest clay,-had tempered it with her own milk, and breathed into it the sweetest spirit;-she had made him all gentle, generous, and humane;—she had filled his heart with trust and confidence, and disposed every passage which led to it for the communication of the tenderest offices; -she had, moreover, considered the other causes for which matrimony was ordained Now, this last article was somewhat apocryphal; and the devil, who is the great disturber of our faiths in this world, had raised scruples in Mrs. Wadman's brain about it; and, like a true devil as he was, had done his own work at the same time, by turning my uncle Toby's virtue thereupon into nothing but empty bottles, tripes, trunk-hose, and pantoufles. CHAPTER CCCII. Mrs. Bridget had pawned all the little stock of honour a poor chambermaid was worth in the world, that she would get to the bottom of the affair in ten days; and it was built upon one of the most concessible postulata in nature; namely, that whilst my uncle Toby was making love to her mistress, the Corporal could find nothing better to do than to make love to her;—' And I'll let him as much as he will,' said Bridget, to get it out of him.' Friendship has two garments, an outer and an under one. Bridget was serving her mistress's interests in the one, and doing the thing which most pleased herself in the other; so had as many stakes depending upon my uncle Toby's wound as the devil himself. Mrs. Wadman had but one ;-and as it possibly might be her last, (without discouraging Mrs. Bridget, or discrediting her talents) was determined to play her cards herself. She wanted not encouragement: a child might have looked into his hand;-there was such a plainness and simplicity in his playing out what trumps he had,with such an unmistrusting ignorance of the ten-ace, and so naked and defenceless did he sit upon the same sofa with Widow Wadman, that a generous heart would have wept to have won the game of him. Let us drop the metaphor. CHAPTER CCCIII. And the story too, if you please; for though I have all along been hastening towards this part of it, with so much earnest desire, as well knowing it to be the choicest morsel of what I had to offer to the world, yet, now that I am got to it, any one is welcome to take my pen and go on with the story for me that will;-I see the difficulties of the descriptions I am going to give, and feel my want of powers. It is one comfort, at least, to me, that I lost some fourscore ounces of blood this week, in a most uneritical fever, which attacked me at the beginning of this chapter; so that I have still some hopes remaining, it may be more in the serous or globular parts of the blood, than in the subtile aura of the brain :--be it which it will,-an Invocation can do no hurt ;—and I leave the affair entirely to the invoked, to inspire or to inject me according as he sees good. THE INVOCATION. Gentle Spirit of sweetest humour, who erst didst sit upon the easy pen of my beloved Cervantes!-Thou, who glidedst daily through his lattice, and turnedst the twilight of his prison into noon-day brightness by thy presence,-tingedst his little urn of water with heavensent nectar, and, all the time he wrote of Sancho and his master, didst cast thy mystic mantle o'er his withered stump,1 and wide extendedst it to all the evils of his life, -Turn in hither, I beseech thee !—behold these breeches!-they are all I have in the world;-that piteous rent was given them at Lyons. My shirts! see what a deadly schism has happened amongst 'em ;-for the laps are in Lombardy, and the rest of 'em here.-I never had but six, and a cunning gipsy of a laundress at Milan cut me off the fore-laps of five. To do her justice, she did it with some consideration, for I was returning out of Italy. And yet, notwithstanding all this, and a pistol tinder-box, which was, moreover, filched from me at Sienna, and twice that I paid five Pauls for two hard eggs, once at Raddicofini, and a second time at Capua, I do not think a journey through France and Italy, provided a man keeps his temper all the way, so bad a thing as some people would make you believe; there must be ups and downs, or how the deuce He lost his hand at the battle of Lepanto. should we get into the valleys where Nature spreads so many tables of entertainment?-'Tis nonsense to imagine they will lend you their voitures to be shaken to pieces for nothing; and, unless you pay twelve sous for greasing your wheels, how should the poor peasant get butter to his bread ?—We really expect too much; -and, for the livre or two above par for your supper and bed,—at the most they are but one shilling and ninepence-halfpenny,-who would embroil their philosophy for it? For heaven's and for your own sake, pay it, pay it with both hands open, rather than leave Disappointment sitting drooping upon the eyes of your fair hostess and her damsels, in the gateway, at your departure ;-and besides, my dear sir, you get a sisterly kiss of each of 'em worth a pound :—at least I did; -For my uncle Toby's amours running all the way in my head, they had the same effect upon me as if they had been my own.-I was in the most perfect state of bounty and good-will, and felt the kindliest harmony vibrating within me, with every oscillation of the chaise alike; so that whether the roads were rough or smooth, it made no difference; every thing I saw, or had to do with, touched upon some secret spring, either of sentiment or rapture. -They were the sweetest notes I ever heard ; and I instantly let down the fore-glass to hear them more distinctly.-Tis Maria, said the postilion, observing I was listening.-Poor Maria, continued he, (leaning his body on one side to let me see her, for he was in a line betwixt us) is sitting upon a bank, playing her vespers upon her pipe, with her little goat beside her. The young fellow uttered this with an accent and a look so perfectly in tune to a feeling heart, that I instantly made a vow I would give him a four-andtwenty sous piece when I got to Moulins. -And who is poor Maria? said 1. |