and discontent! What one misfortune or disaster in the book of embryotic evils, that could unmechanize thy frame, or entangle thy filaments! which has not fallen upon thy head, or ever thou camest into the world⸺what evils in thy passage into it!⸻what evils since!⸺produced into being, in the decline of thy father’s days⸺when the powers of his imagination and of his body were waxing feeble⸺when radical heat and radical moisture, the elements which should have temper’d thine, were drying up; and nothing left to found thy stamina in, but negations—’tis pitiful⸻brother Toby , at the best, and called out for all the little helps that care and attention on both sides could give it. But how were we defeated! You know the event, brother Toby ⸺’tis too melancholy a one to be repeated now⸺when the few animal spirits I was worth in the world, and with which memory, fancy, and quick parts should have been convey’d⸻were all dispersed, confused, confounded, scattered, and sent to the devil.⸻
Here then was the time to have put a stop to this persecution against him;⸻and tried an experiment at least⸻whether calmness and serenity of mind in your sister, with a due attention, brother Toby , to her evacuations and repletions⸻and the rest of her non-naturals, might not, in a course of nine months gestation, have set all things to rights.⸻My child was bereft of these!⸻What a teazing life did she lead herself, and consequently her fœtus too, with that nonsensical anxiety of hers about lying-in in town? I thought my sister submitted with the greatest patience, replied my uncle Toby ⸺⸺I never heard her utter one fretful word about it.⸻She fumed inwardly, cried my father; and that, let me tell you, brother, was ten times worse for the child—and then! what battles did she fight with me, and what perpetual storms about the midwife.⸻There she gave vent, said my uncle Toby .⸻Vent! cried my father, looking up.
But what was all this, my dear Toby , to the injuries done us by my child’s coming head foremost into the world, when all I wished, in this