ncing
the account upon the spot, you stand as you were--nay sometimes gain the
advantage of the attack by it.

This will be fully illustrated to the world in my chapter of wishes.--

Dr. Slop did not understand the nature of this defence;--he was puzzled
with it, and it put an entire stop to the dispute for four minutes and a
half;--five had been fatal to it:--my father saw the danger--the dispute
was one of the most interesting disputes in the world, 'Whether the
child of his prayers and endeavours should be born without a head or
with one:'--he waited to the last moment, to allow Dr. Slop, in whose
behalf the wish was made, his right of returning it; but perceiving, I
say, that he was confounded, and continued looking with that perplexed
vacuity of eye which puzzled souls generally stare with--first in my
uncle Toby's face--then in his--then up--then down--then east--east and
by east, and so on,--coasting it along by the plinth of the wainscot
till he had got to the opposite point of the compass,--and that he had
actually begun to count the brass nails upon the arm of his chair,--my
father thought there was no time to be lost with my uncle Toby, so took
up the discourse as follows.

Chapter 1.XLVI.

'--What prodigious armies you had in Flanders!'--

Brother Toby, replied my father, taking his wig from off his head
with his right hand, and with his left pulling out a striped India
handkerchief from his right coat pocket, in order to rub his head, as he
argued the point with my uncle Toby.--

--Now, in this I think my father was much to blame; and I will give you
my reasons for it.

Matters of no more seeming consequence in themselves than, 'Whether my
father should have taken off his wig with his right hand or with his
left,'--have divided the greatest kingdoms, and made the crowns of the
monarchs who governed them, to totter upon their heads.--But need I tell
you, Sir, that the circumstances with which every thing in this world
is begirt, give every thing in this world its size and shape!--and by
tightening it, or relaxing it, this way or that, make the thing to be,
what it is--great--little--good--bad--indifferent or not indifferent,
just as the case happens?

As my father's India handkerchief was in his right coat pocket, he
should by no means have suffered his right hand to have got engaged: on
the contrary, instead of taking off his wig with it, as he did, he ought
to have committed that entirely to