emotion.

In a fortnight's close and painful application, which, by the bye, did
my uncle Toby's wound, upon his groin, no good,--he was enabled, by the
help of some marginal documents at the feet of the elephant, together
with Gobesius's military architecture and pyroballogy, translated from
the Flemish, to form his discourse with passable perspicuity; and before
he was two full months gone,--he was right eloquent upon it, and
could make not only the attack of the advanced counterscarp with great
order;--but having, by that time, gone much deeper into the art, than
what his first motive made necessary, my uncle Toby was able to cross
the Maes and Sambre; make diversions as far as Vauban's line, the abbey
of Salsines, &c. and give his visitors as distinct a history of each of
their attacks, as of that of the gate of St. Nicolas, where he had the
honour to receive his wound.

But desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with
the acquisition of it. The more my uncle Toby pored over his map,
the more he took a liking to it!--by the same process and electrical
assimilation, as I told you, through which I ween the souls of
connoisseurs themselves, by long friction and incumbition, have the
happiness, at length, to get all be-virtu'd--be-pictured,--be-
butterflied, and be-fiddled.

The more my uncle Toby drank of this sweet fountain of science, the
greater was the heat and impatience of his thirst, so that before the
first year of his confinement had well gone round, there was scarce a
fortified town in Italy or Flanders, of which, by one means or other,
he had not procured a plan, reading over as he got them, and carefully
collating therewith the histories of their sieges, their demolitions,
their improvements, and new works, all which he would read with that
intense application and delight, that he would forget himself, his
wound, his confinement, his dinner.

In the second year my uncle Toby purchased Ramelli and Cataneo,
translated from the Italian;--likewise Stevinus, Moralis, the Chevalier
de Ville, Lorini, Cochorn, Sheeter, the Count de Pagan, the Marshal
Vauban, Mons. Blondel, with almost as many more books of military
architecture, as Don Quixote was found to have of chivalry, when the
curate and barber invaded his library.

Towards the beginning of the third year, which was in August,
ninety-nine, my uncle Toby found it necessary to understand a little of
projectiles:--and having judged i