with humble submission to your Honour’s better judgment,⸺that these ravelins, bastions, curtins, and horn-works, make but a poor, contemptible, fiddle-faddle piece of work of it here upon paper, compared to what your Honour and I could make of it were we in the country by ourselves, and had but a rood, or a rood and a half of ground to do what we pleased with: As summer is coming on, continued Trim , your Honour might sit out of doors, and give me the nography—(Call it ichnography, quoth my uncle)⸺of the town or citadel, your Honour was pleased to sit down before,—and I will be shot by your Honour upon the glacis of it, if I did not fortify it to your Honour’s mind⸺I dare say thou would’st, Trim , quoth my uncle.—For if your Honour, continued the Corporal, could but mark me the polygon, with its exact lines and angles—That I could do very well, quoth my uncle.—I would begin with the fossé, and if your Honour could tell me the proper depth and breadth—I can to a hair’s breadth, Trim , replied my uncle.—I would throw out the earth upon this hand towards the town for the scarp,—and on that hand towards the campaign for the counterscarp.—Very right, Trim , quoth my uncle Toby :⸺And when I had sloped them to your mind,⸺an’ please your Honour, I would face the glacis, as the finest fortifications are done in Flanders , with sods,⸺and as your Honour knows they should be,—and I would make the walls and parapets with sods too.—The best engineers call them gazons, Trim , said my uncle Toby .⸺Whether they are gazons or sods, is not much matter, replied Trim ; your Honour knows they are ten times beyond a facing either of brick or stone.⸺I know they are, Trim , in some respects,⸺quoth my uncle Toby , nodding his head;—for a cannonball enters into the gazon right onwards, without bringing any rubbish down with it, which might fill the fossé (as was the case at St. Nicolas’s gate), and facilitate the passage over it.
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