onception of the rood and the half of
ground which lay at the bottom of my uncle Toby's kitchen-garden, and
which was the scene of so many of his delicious hours,--the fault is
not in me,--but in his imagination;--for I am sure I gave him so minute
a description, I was almost ashamed of it.

When _Fate_ was looking forwards one afternoon, into the great
transactions of future times,--and recollected for what purposes this
little plot, by a decree fast bound down in iron, had been
destined,--she gave a nod to _Nature_:--'twas enough,--Nature threw
half a spadeful of her kindliest compost upon it, with just so _much_
clay in {77} it as to retain the forms of angles and indenting,--and so
_little_ of it too, as not to 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 roll of packthread, and a number of small
pickets 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 _banquettes_, parapets, etc.--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 town, with its works, was finished, my uncle Toby and the
Corporal began to run their first parallel,--not at random, or
anyhow,--but from the same points and distances the allies had begun to
run {78} 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 Ma