more than what was reasonable;--and yet, as reasonable
as it was, I have ever thought it hard that the whole weight of the
article should have fallen entirely, as it did, upon myself.

But I was begot and born to misfortunes;--for my poor mother, whether
it was wind or water--or a compound of both,--or neither;--or whether it
was simply the mere swell of imagination and fancy in her;--or how far
a strong wish and desire to have it so, might mislead her judgment;--in
short, whether she was deceived or deceiving in this matter, it no
way becomes me to decide. The fact was this, That in the latter end of
September 1717, which was the year before I was born, my mother having
carried my father up to town much against the grain,--he peremptorily
insisted upon the clause;--so that I was doom'd, by marriage-articles,
to have my nose squeez'd as flat to my face, as if the destinies had
actually spun me without one.

How this event came about,--and what a train of vexatious
disappointments, in one stage or other of my life, have pursued me from
the mere loss, or rather compression, of this one single member,--shall
be laid before the reader all in due time.

Chapter 1.XVI.

My father, as any body may naturally imagine, came down with my mother
into the country, in but a pettish kind of a humour. The first twenty
or five-and-twenty miles he did nothing in the world but fret and teaze
himself, and indeed my mother too, about the cursed expence, which he
said might every shilling of it have been saved;--then what vexed him
more than every thing else was, the provoking time of the year,--which,
as I told you, was towards the end of September, when his wall-fruit and
green gages especially, in which he was very curious, were just ready
for pulling:--'Had he been whistled up to London, upon a Tom Fool's
errand, in any other month of the whole year, he should not have said
three words about it.'

For the next two whole stages, no subject would go down, but the heavy
blow he had sustain'd from the loss of a son, whom it seems he had fully
reckon'd upon in his mind, and register'd down in his pocket-book, as
a second staff for his old age, in case Bobby should fail him. 'The
disappointment of this, he said, was ten times more to a wise man, than
all the money which the journey, &c. had cost him, put together,--rot
the hundred and twenty pounds,--he did not mind it a rush.'

From Stilton, all the way to Grantham, nothing in the