, I suppose, of every parent--yet
do not we all find, they are certain sorrows, and very uncertain
comforts? and what is there, dear sir, to pay one for the
heart-achs--what compensation for the many tender and disquieting
apprehensions of a suffering and defenceless mother who brings them into
life? I declare, said my uncle Toby, smit with pity, I know of none;
unless it be the pleasure which it has pleased God--

A fiddlestick! quoth she.

Chapter 4.the Seventy-eighth.

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.

Chapter 4.LXXXV.

It is natural for a perfect stranger who is going from London to
Edinburgh, to enquire before he sets out, how many miles to York; which
is about the half way--nor does any body wonder, if he goes on and asks
about the corporation, &c....

It was just as natural for Mrs. Wadman, whose first husband was all his
time afflicted wit