his stool.--

Chapter 2.LIV.

My father was returned from his walk to the fish-pond--and opened the
parlour-door in the very height of the attack, just as my uncle Toby was
marching up the glacis--Trim recovered his arms--never was my uncle Toby
caught in riding at such a desperate rate in his life! Alas! my uncle
Toby! had not a weightier matter called forth all the ready eloquence
of my father--how hadst thou then and thy poor Hobby-Horse too been
insulted!

My father hung up his hat with the same air he took it down; and after
giving a slight look at the disorder of the room, he took hold of one
of the chairs which had formed the corporal's breach, and placing
it over-against my uncle Toby, he sat down in it, and as soon as
the tea-things were taken away, and the door shut, he broke out in a
lamentation as follows:

My Father's Lamentation.

It is in vain longer, said my father, addressing himself as much
to Ernulphus's curse, which was laid upon the corner of the
chimney-piece--as to my uncle Toby who sat under it--it is in vain
longer, said my father, in the most querulous monotony imaginable,
to struggle as I have done against this most uncomfortable of human
persuasions--I see it plainly, that either for my own sins, brother
Toby, or the sins and follies of the Shandy family, Heaven has thought
fit to draw forth the heaviest of its artillery against me; and that the
prosperity of my child is the point upon which the whole force of it is
directed to play.--Such a thing would batter the whole universe about
our ears, brother Shandy, said my uncle Toby--if it was so-Unhappy
Tristram! child of wrath! child of decrepitude! interruption! mistake!
and discontent! What one misfortune or disaster in the book of embryotic
evils, that could unmechanize thy frame, or entangle thy filaments!
which has not fallen upon thy head, or ever thou camest into the
world--what evils in thy passage into it!--what evils since!--produced
into being, in the decline of thy father's days--when the powers of his
imagination and of his body were waxing feeble--when radical heat and
radical moisture, the elements which should have temper'd thine, were
drying up; and nothing left to found thy stamina in, but negations--'tis
pitiful--brother Toby, at the best, and called out for all the little
helps that care and attention on both sides could give it. But how were
we defeated! You know the event, brother Toby--'tis too melancholy a