nds--'Tis not preaching the
gospel--but ourselves--For my own part, continued Yorick, I had rather
direct five words point-blank to the heart.--As Yorick pronounced
the word point-blank, my uncle Toby rose up to say something upon
projectiles--when a single word and no more uttered from the opposite
side of the table drew every one's ears towards it--a word of all others
in the dictionary the last in that place to be expected--a word I am
ashamed to write--yet must be written--must be read--illegal--
uncanonical--guess ten thousand guesses, multiplied into themselves--
rack--torture your invention for ever, you're where you was--In short,
I'll tell it in the next chapter.

Chapter 2.LXII.

Zounds!--Z...ds! cried Phutatorius, partly to himself--and yet high
enough to be heard--and what seemed odd, 'twas uttered in a construction
of look, and in a tone of voice, somewhat between that of a man in
amazement and one in bodily pain.

One or two who had very nice ears, and could distinguish the expression
and mixture of the two tones as plainly as a third or a fifth, or any
other chord in musick--were the most puzzled and perplexed with it--the
concord was good in itself--but then 'twas quite out of the key, and
no way applicable to the subject started;--so that with all their
knowledge, they could not tell what in the world to make of it.

Others who knew nothing of musical expression, and merely lent their
ears to the plain import of the word, imagined that Phutatorius, who was
somewhat of a cholerick spirit, was just going to snatch the cudgels out
of Didius's hands, in order to bemaul Yorick to some purpose--and that
the desperate monosyllable Z...ds was the exordium to an oration, which,
as they judged from the sample, presaged but a rough kind of handling of
him; so that my uncle Toby's good-nature felt a pang for what Yorick was
about to undergo. But seeing Phutatorius stop short, without any attempt
or desire to go on--a third party began to suppose, that it was no more
than an involuntary respiration, casually forming itself into the shape
of a twelve-penny oath--without the sin or substance of one.

Others, and especially one or two who sat next him, looked upon it on
the contrary as a real and substantial oath, propensly formed against
Yorick, to whom he was known to bear no good liking--which said oath,
as my father philosophized upon it, actually lay fretting and fuming at
that very time in the upper regi