for 'em.--But
pray, quoth my uncle Toby,--who's can this be?--How could it get into my
Stevinus? A man must be as great a conjurer as Stevinus, said my
father, to resolve the second question:--The first, I think, is not
so difficult;--for unless my judgment greatly deceives me,--I know the
author, for 'tis wrote, certainly, by the parson of the parish.

The similitude of the stile and manner of it, with those my father
constantly had heard preached in his parish-church, was the ground of
his conjecture,--proving it as strongly, as an argument a priori could
prove such a thing to a philosophic mind, That it was Yorick's and no
one's else:--It was proved to be so, a posteriori, the day after, when
Yorick sent a servant to my uncle Toby's house to enquire after it.

It seems that Yorick, who was inquisitive after all kinds of knowledge,
had borrowed Stevinus of my uncle Toby, and had carelesly popped his
sermon, as soon as he had made it, into the middle of Stevinus; and
by an act of forgetfulness, to which he was ever subject, he had sent
Stevinus home, and his sermon to keep him company.

Ill-fated sermon! Thou wast lost, after this recovery of thee, a second
time, dropped thru' an unsuspected fissure in thy master's pocket, down
into a treacherous and a tattered lining,--trod deep into the dirt by
the left hind-foot of his Rosinante inhumanly stepping upon thee as
thou falledst;--buried ten days in the mire,--raised up out of it by
a beggar,--sold for a halfpenny to a parish-clerk,--transferred to
his parson,--lost for ever to thy own, the remainder of his days,--nor
restored to his restless Manes till this very moment, that I tell the
world the story.

Can the reader believe, that this sermon of Yorick's was preached at an
assize, in the cathedral of York, before a thousand witnesses, ready to
give oath of it, by a certain prebendary of that church, and actually
printed by him when he had done,--and within so short a space as two
years and three months after Yorick's death?--Yorick indeed, was never
better served in his life;--but it was a little hard to maltreat him
after, and plunder him after he was laid in his grave.

However, as the gentleman who did it was in perfect charity with
Yorick,--and, in conscious justice, printed but a few copies to give
away;--and that I am told he could moreover have made as good a one
himself, had he thought fit,--I declare I would not have published this
anecdote to the world;