k--surely they
had better be printed apart,--we'll consider the affair--so take the
following sketch of them in the mean time.

Chapter 3.LXV.

When the town, with its works, was finished, my uncle Toby and the
corporal began to run their first parallel--not at random, or any
how--but from the same points and distances the allies had begun to run
theirs; and regulating their approaches and attacks, by the accounts
my uncle Toby received from the daily papers,--they went on, during the
whole siege, step by step with the allies.

When the duke of Marlborough made a lodgment,--my uncle Toby made a
lodgment too.--And when the face of a bastion was battered down, or a
defence ruined,--the corporal took his mattock and did as much,--and
so on;--gaining ground, and making themselves masters of the works one
after another, till the town fell into their hands.

To one who took pleasure in the happy state of others,--there could not
have been a greater sight in world, than on a post morning, in which a
practicable breach had been made by the duke of Marlborough, in the
main body of the place,--to have stood behind the horn-beam hedge, and
observed the spirit with which my uncle Toby, with Trim behind him,
sallied forth;--the one with the Gazette in his hand,--the other with a
spade on his shoulder to execute the contents.--What an honest triumph
in my uncle Toby's looks as he marched up to the ramparts! What intense
pleasure swimming in his eye as he stood over the corporal, reading the
paragraph ten times over to him, as he was at work, lest, peradventure,
he should make the breach an inch too wide,--or leave it an inch too
narrow.--But when the chamade was beat, and the corporal helped my uncle
up it, and followed with the colours in his hand, to fix them upon the
ramparts--Heaven! Earth! Sea!--but what avails apostrophes?--with
all your elements, wet or dry, ye never compounded so intoxicating a
draught.

In this track of happiness for many years, without one interruption to
it, except now and then when the wind continued to blow due west for a
week or ten days together, which detained the Flanders mail, and kept
them so long in torture,--but still 'twas the torture of the happy--In
this track, I say, did my uncle Toby and Trim move for many years, every
year of which, and sometimes every month, from the invention of either
the one or the other of them, adding some new conceit or quirk of
improvement to their operati