words with the sex in as many years;—no, he got it, Madam, by a blow.⸺A blow!—Yes, Madam, it was owing to a blow from a stone, broke off by a ball from the parapet of a horn-work at the siege of Namur , which struck full upon my uncle Toby’s groin.—Which way could that effect it? The story of that, Madam, is long and interesting;—but it would be running my history all upon heaps to give it you here.⸺’Tis for an episode hereafter; and every circumstance relating to it, in its proper place, shall be faithfully laid before you:—’Till then, it is not in my power to give farther light into this matter, or say more than what I have said already,⸺That my uncle Toby was a gentleman of unparallel’d modesty, which happening to be somewhat subtilized and rarified by the constant heat of a little family pride,⸺they both so wrought together within him, that he could never bear to hear the affair of my aunt Dinah touch’d upon, but with the greatest emotion.⸺The least hint of it was enough to make the blood fly into his face;—but when my father enlarged upon the story in mixed companies, which the illustration of his hypothesis frequently obliged him to do,—the unfortunate blight of one of the fairest branches of the family, would set my uncle Toby’s honour and modesty o’bleeding; and he would often take my father aside, in the greatest concern imaginable, to expostulate and tell him, he would give him anything in the world, only to let the story rest.
My father, I believe, had the truest love and tenderness for my uncle Toby , that ever one brother bore towards another, and would have done anything in nature, which one brother in reason could have desir’d of another, to have made my uncle Toby’s heart easy in this, or any other point. But this lay out of his power.
⸺My father, as I told you, was a philosopher in grain,—speculative,—systematical;—and my aunt Dinah’s affair was a matter of as much consequence to him, as the retrogradation of the planets to Copernicus :—The backslidings of Venus in her orbit fortified the