"Now," quoth the corporal, setting his left hand akimbo, and giving such a flourish with his right as just promised success, and no more, "if your Honour will give me leave to lay down the plan of this attack."

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"Thou wilt please me by it, Trim," said my uncle Toby, exceedingly; and as I foresee thou must act in it as my aide-de-camp, here's a crown, corporal, to begin with, to steep thy commission."

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Then, an' please your Honour," said the corporal, making a bow first for his commission, "we will begin by getting your Honour's laced clothes out of the great campaign-trunk, to be well aired, and have the blue and gold taken up at the sleeves; and I'll put your white ramillie-wig fresh into pipes; and send for a tailor to have your Honour's thin scarlet breeches turned."

"I had better take the red plush ones," quoth my uncle Toby....

"Your Honour's two razors shall be new set, and I will get my Montero cap furbished up, and put on poor Lieutenant Le Fèvre's regimental coat, which your Honour gave me to wear for his sake; and as soon as your Honour is clean shaved, and has got your clean shirt on, with your blue and gold or your fine scarlet, sometimes one and sometimes t'other, and everything is ready for the attack, we'll march up boldly, as if 'twas to the face of a bastion; and whilst your Honour engages Mrs. Wadman in the parlour to the right, I'll attack Mrs. Bridget in the kitchen to the left; and having seized that pass, I'll answer for it," said the corporal, snapping his fingers over his head, "that the day is your own."

"I wish I may but manage it right," said my uncle Toby; "but I declare, corporal, I had rather march up to the very edge of a trench."

“A woman is quite a different thing," said the corporal. "I suppose so," quoth my uncle Toby.-" Tristram Shandy."

The Siege of the Cities in the Kitchen-Garden

My uncle Toby came down with plans along with him of almost every fortified town in Italy and Flanders; so let the Duke of Marlborough, or the Allies, have sat 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 pack-thread, 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 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 till night and chatting kindly with the corporal upon pastdone 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 encroaching 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 rhapsodise them, as I once intended, into the body of the work. Surely they had better be printed apart. We'll consider the affair; so take the following sketch of them in the meantime:

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 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, 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 the 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 hornbeam 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 beaten, 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 avail 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 it was 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 little conceit or quirk of improvement to the operations, which always opened fresh springs of delight in carrying them on.

The first year's campaign was carried on, from beginning to end, in the plain and simple method I've related.

In the second year, in which my uncle Toby took Liège and Ruremond, he thought he might afford the expense of four handsome drawbridges, of two of which I have given an exact description in the former part of my work.

At the latter end of the same year he added a couple of gates with portcullises-these last were converted afterward into orgues, as the better thing—and during the winter of the same year, my uncle Toby, instead of a new suit of clothes, which he always had at Christmas, treated himself with a handsome sentry-box, to stand at the corner of the bowlinggreen, betwixt which point and the foot of the glacis there was left a little kind of an esplanade, for him and the corporal to confer and hold councils of war upon.

The sentry-box was in case of rain.

All these were painted white three times over the ensuing spring, which enabled my uncle Toby to take the field with great splendour.

My father would often say to Yorick that if any mortal in the whole universe had done such a thing except his brother Toby, it would have been looked upon by the world as one of the most refined satires upon the parade and prancing manner in which Louis XIV., from the beginning of the war, but particularly that very year, had taken the field. But 'tis not in my brother Toby's nature, kind soul! my father would add, to insult any one.

But let us go on.

I must observe that, although in the first year's campaign the word town is often mentioned, yet there was no town at that time within the polygon; that addition was not made till the summer following the spring in which the bridges