cling to the spade, and render works of so much glory,
nasty in foul weather.

My uncle Toby came down, as the reader has been informed, with plans
along with him, of almost every fortified town in Italy and Flanders;
so let the duke of Marlborough, or the allies, have set down before what
town they pleased, my uncle Toby was prepared for them.

His way, which was the simplest one in the world, was this; as soon as
ever a town was invested--(but sooner when the design was known) to take
the plan of it (let it be what town it would), and enlarge it upon a
scale to the exact size of his bowling-green; upon the surface of which,
by means of a large role of packthread, and a number of small piquets
driven into the ground, at the several angles and redans, he transferred
the lines from his paper; then taking the profile of the place, with its
works, to determine the depths and slopes of the ditches,--the talus of
the glacis, and the precise height of the several banquets, parapets,
&c.--he set the corporal to work--and sweetly went it on:--The nature
of the soil,--the nature of the work itself,--and above all, the
good-nature of my uncle Toby sitting by from morning to night, and
chatting kindly with the corporal upon past-done deeds,--left Labour
little else but the ceremony of the name.

When the place was finished in this manner, and put into a proper
posture of defence,--it was invested,--and my uncle Toby and the
corporal began to run their first parallel.--I beg I may not be
interrupted in my story, by being told, That the first parallel should
be at least three hundred toises distant from the main body of the
place,--and that I have not left a single inch for it;--for my uncle
Toby took the liberty of incroaching upon his kitchen-garden, for the
sake of enlarging his works on the bowling-green, and for that reason
generally ran his first and second parallels betwixt two rows of his
cabbages and his cauliflowers; the conveniences and inconveniences of
which will be considered at large in the history of my uncle Toby's
and the corporal's campaigns, of which, this I'm now writing is but a
sketch, and will be finished, if I conjecture right, in three pages (but
there is no guessing)--The campaigns themselves will take up as many
books; and therefore I apprehend it would be hanging too great a weight
of one kind of matter in so flimsy a performance as this, to rhapsodize
them, as I once intended, into the body of the wor