Such a ridiculous tale of a dispute between a man and his wife, never surely in any age or country got vent through the keyhole of a street-door.
My mother, you must know⸻but I have fifty things more necessary to let you know first⸺I have a hundred difficulties which I have promised to clear up, and a thousand distresses and domestick misadventures crowding in upon me thick and threefold, one upon the neck of another. A cow broke in (tomorrow morning) to my uncle Toby’s fortifications, and eat up two rations and a half of dried grass, tearing up the sods with it, which faced his horn-work and covered way.⸺ Trim insists upon being tried by a court-martial—the cow to be shot— Slop to be crucifix’d —myself to be tristram’d and at my very baptism made a martyr of;⸺poor unhappy devils that we all are!⸺I want swaddling⸻but there is no time to be lost in exclamations⸻I have left my father lying across his bed, and my uncle Toby in his old fringed chair, sitting beside him, and promised I would go back to them in half an hour; and five-and-thirty minutes are laps’d already.⸻Of all the perplexities a mortal author was ever seen in⸺this certainly is the greatest, for I have Hafen Slawkenbergius’s folio, Sir, to finish⸺a dialogue between my father and my uncle Toby , upon the solution of Prignitz , Scroderus , Ambrose Paræus , Ponocrates , and Grangousier to relate—a tale out of Slawkenbergius to translate, and all this in five minutes less than no time at all;⸻such a head!—would to Heaven my enemies only saw the inside of it!