oidably brought the thumb into action--and the forefinger
and thumb being once engaged, as naturally brought in the whole hand.
Thine, dear uncle Toby! was never now in 'ts right place--Mrs. Wadman
had it ever to take up, or, with the gentlest pushings, protrusions,
and equivocal compressions, that a hand to be removed is capable of
receiving--to get it press'd a hair breadth of one side out of her way.

Whilst this was doing, how could she forget to make him sensible, that
it was her leg (and no one's else) at the bottom of the sentry-box,
which slightly press'd against the calf of his--So that my uncle Toby
being thus attack'd and sore push'd on both his wings--was it a wonder,
if now and then, it put his centre into disorder?--

--The duce take it! said my uncle Toby.

Chapter 4.XLI.

These attacks of Mrs. Wadman, you will readily conceive to be of
different kinds; varying from each other, like the attacks which history
is full of, and from the same reasons. A general looker-on would scarce
allow them to be attacks at all--or if he did, would confound them all
together--but I write not to them: it will be time enough to be a little
more exact in my descriptions of them, as I come up to them, which will
not be for some chapters; having nothing more to add in this, but that
in a bundle of original papers and drawings which my father took care
to roll up by themselves, there is a plan of Bouchain in perfect
preservation (and shall be kept so, whilst I have power to preserve any
thing), upon the lower corner of which, on the right hand side, there is
still remaining the marks of a snuffy finger and thumb, which there
is all the reason in the world to imagine, were Mrs. Wadman's; for
the opposite side of the margin, which I suppose to have been my uncle
Toby's, is absolutely clean: This seems an authenticated record of one
of these attacks; for there are vestigia of the two punctures partly
grown up, but still visible on the opposite corner of the map, which are
unquestionably the very holes, through which it has been pricked up in
the sentry-box--

By all that is priestly! I value this precious relick, with its stigmata
and pricks, more than all the relicks of the Romish church--always
excepting, when I am writing upon these matters, the pricks which
entered the flesh of St. Radagunda in the desert, which in your road
from Fesse to Cluny, the nuns of that name will shew you for love.

Chapter 4.XLII.

I t