• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Your Honour understands these matters, replied Corporal Trim, better than any officer in his Majesty’s service;——but would your Honour please to let the bespeaking of the table alone, and let us but go into the country, I would work under your Honour’s directions like a horse, and make fortifications for you something like a tansy,13 with all their batteries, saps, ditches, and pallisadoes, that it should be worth all the world’s riding twenty miles to go and see it.

My uncle Toby blushed as red as scarlet14 as Trim went on;—but it was not a blush of guilt,—of modesty,—or of anger;—it was a blush of joy;—he was fired with Corporal Trim’s project and description.—Trim! said my uncle Toby, thou hast said enough.—We might begin the campaign, continued Trim, on the very day that his Majesty and the Allies take the field, and demolish ’em town by town as fast as——Trim, quoth my uncle Toby, say no more.—Your Honour, continued Trim, might sit in your arm-chair, (pointing to it) this fine weather, giving me your orders, and I would——Say no more, Trim, quoth my uncle Toby.——Besides, your Honour would get not only pleasure and good pastime,—but good air, and good exercise, and good health,—and your Honour’s wound would be well in a month. Thou hast said enough, Trim,—quoth my uncle Toby, (putting his hand into his breeches-pocket)—I like thy project mightily;—and if your Honour pleases, I’ll, this moment, go and buy a pioneer’s spade to take down with us, and I’ll bespeak a shovel and a pick-ax, and a couple of———Say no more, Trim, quoth my uncle Toby, leaping up upon one leg, quite overcome with rapture,——and thrusting a guinea into Trim’s hand.——Trim, said my uncle Toby, say no more;–but go down, Trim, this moment, my lad, and bring up my supper this instant.

Trim ran down and brought up his Master’s supper,—to no purpose:——Trim’s plan of operation ran so in my uncle Toby’s head, he could not taste it.—Trim, quoth my uncle Toby, get me to bed;—’twas all one.—Corporal Trim’s description had fired his imagination,—my uncle Toby could not shut his eyes.–The more he consider’d it, the more bewitching the scene appeared to him;—so that, two full hours before day-light, he had come to a final determination, and had concerted the whole plan of his and Corporal Trim’s decampment.

My uncle Toby had a little neat country-house of his own, in the village where my father’s estate lay at Shandy, which had been left him by an old uncle, with a small estate of about one hundred pounds a-year. Behind this house, and contiguous to it, was a kitchen-garden of about half an acre;—and at the bottom of the garden, and cut off from it by a tall yew hedge, was a bowling-green, containing just about as much ground as Corporal Trim wished for;—so that as Trim uttered the words, “A rood15 and a half of ground to do what they would with:”——This identical bowling-green instantly presented itself, and became curiously painted, all at once, upon the retina of my uncle Toby’s fancy;——which was the physical cause of making him change colour, or at least, of heightening his blush to that immoderate degree I spoke of.

Never did lover post down to a belov’d mistress with more heat and expectation, than my uncle Toby did, to enjoy this self-same thing in private;—I say in private;—for it was sheltered from the house, as I told you, by a tall yew hedge, and was covered on the other three sides, from mortal sight, by rough holly and thickset flowering shrubs;—so that the idea of not being seen, did not a little contribute to the idea of pleasure pre-conceived in my uncle Toby’s mind.—Vain thought! however thick it was planted about,——or private soever it might seem,—to think, dear uncle Toby, of enjoying a thing which took up a whole rood and a half of ground,—and not have it known!

How my uncle Toby and Corporal Trim managed this matter,—with the history of their campaigns, which were no way barren of events,—may make no uninteresting under-plot in the epitasis16 and working