e, to keep all
fancies of that kind out of her head--Nature had done her part, to have
spared him this trouble; and what was not a little inconsistent, my
father knew it--And here am I sitting, this 12th day of August 1766, in
a purple jerkin and yellow pair of slippers, without either wig or cap
on, a most tragicomical completion of his prediction, 'That I should
neither think, nor act like any other man's child, upon that very
account.'

The mistake in my father, was in attacking my mother's motive, instead
of the act itself; for certainly key-holes were made for other purposes;
and considering the act, as an act which interfered with a true
proposition, and denied a key-hole to be what it was--it became a
violation of nature; and was so far, you see, criminal.

It is for this reason, an' please your Reverences, That key-holes are
the occasions of more sin and wickedness, than all other holes in this
world put together.

--which leads me to my uncle Toby's amours.

Chapter 4.LXI.

Though the corporal had been as good as his word in putting my uncle
Toby's great ramallie-wig into pipes, yet the time was too short to
produce any great effects from it: it had lain many years squeezed up in
the corner of his old campaign trunk; and as bad forms are not so
easy to be got the better of, and the use of candle-ends not so well
understood, it was not so pliable a business as one would have wished.
The corporal with cheary eye and both arms extended, had fallen back
perpendicular from it a score times, to inspire it, if possible, with
a better air--had Spleen given a look at it, 'twould have cost her
ladyship a smile--it curl'd every where but where the corporal would
have it; and where a buckle or two, in his opinion, would have done it
honour, he could as soon have raised the dead.

Such it was--or rather such would it have seem'd upon any other
brow; but the sweet look of goodness which sat upon my uncle Toby's,
assimilated every thing around it so sovereignly to itself, and Nature
had moreover wrote Gentleman with so fair a hand in every line of his
countenance, that even his tarnish'd gold-laced hat and huge cockade of
flimsy taffeta became him; and though not worth a button in themselves,
yet the moment my uncle Toby put them on, they became serious objects,
and altogether seem'd to have been picked up by the hand of Science to
set him off to advantage.

Nothing in this world could have co-operated more power