Now, my father could not lie down with this affliction for his life⸺nor could he carry it upstairs like the other—he walked composedly out with it to the fishpond.
Had my father leaned his head upon his hand, and reasoned an hour which way to have gone⸻reason, with all her force, could not have directed him to anything like it: there is something, Sir, in fishponds⸺but what it is, I leave to system-builders and fishpond-diggers betwixt ’em to find out—but there is something, under the first disorderly transport of the humours, so unaccountably becalming in an orderly and a sober walk towards one of them, that I have often wondered that neither Pythagoras , nor Plato , nor Solon , nor Lycurgus , nor Muhammad , nor any one of your noted lawgivers, ever gave order about them.