ame time the system of peace and harmony of our family; and for
three days together, not only embroiled matters between my father and
my mother, but turn'd likewise the whole house and every thing in it,
except my uncle Toby, quite upside down.

Such a ridiculous tale of a dispute between a man and his wife,
never surely in any age or country got vent through the key-hole of a
street-door.

My mother, you must know--but I have fifty things more necessary to let
you know first--I have a hundred difficulties which I have promised to
clear up, and a thousand distresses and domestick misadventures crowding
in upon me thick and threefold, one upon the neck of another. A cow
broke in (tomorrow morning) to my uncle Toby's fortifications, and eat
up two rations and a half of dried grass, tearing up the sods with it,
which faced his horn-work and covered way.--Trim insists upon
being tried by a court-martial--the cow to be shot--Slop to be
crucifix'd--myself to be tristram'd and at my very baptism made a martyr
of;--poor unhappy devils that we all are!--I want swaddling--but there
is no time to be lost in exclamations--I have left my father lying
across his bed, and my uncle Toby in his old fringed chair, sitting
beside him, and promised I would go back to them in half an hour; and
five-and-thirty minutes are laps'd already.--Of all the perplexities a
mortal author was ever seen in--this certainly is the greatest, for I
have Hafen Slawkenbergius's folio, Sir, to finish--a dialogue between
my father and my uncle Toby, upon the solution of Prignitz, Scroderus,
Ambrose Paraeus, Panocrates, and Grangousier to relate--a tale out of
Slawkenbergius to translate, and all this in five minutes less than
no time at all;--such a head!--would to Heaven my enemies only saw the
inside of it!

Chapter 2.XXXII.

There was not any one scene more entertaining in our family--and to do
it justice in this point;--and I here put off my cap and lay it upon the
table close beside my ink-horn, on purpose to make my declaration to the
world concerning this one article the more solemn--that I believe in my
soul (unless my love and partiality to my understanding blinds me) the
hand of the supreme Maker and first Designer of all things never made
or put a family together (in that period at least of it which I have
sat down to write the story of)--where the characters of it were cast or
contrasted with so dramatick a felicity as ours was, for this end