About two minutes before the time that my uncle Toby interrupted Yorick’s harangue— Gastripheres’s chesnuts were brought in—and as Phutatorius’s fondness for ’em was uppermost in the waiter’s head, he laid them directly before Phutatorius , wrapt up hot in a clean damask napkin.
Now whether it was physically impossible, with half a dozen hands all thrust into the napkin at a time—but that some one chesnut, of more life and rotundity than the rest, must be put in motion—it so fell out, however, that one was actually sent rolling off the table; and as Phutatorius sat straddling under⸺it fell perpendicularly into that particular aperture of Phutatorius’s breeches, for which, to the shame and indelicacy of our language be it spoke, there is no chaste word throughout all Johnson’s dictionary⸺let it suffice to say⸺it was that particular aperture which, in all good societies, the laws of decorum do strictly require, like the temple of Janus (in peace at least) to be universally shut up.
The neglect of this punctilio in Phutatorius (which by the by should be a warning to all mankind) had opened a door to this accident.⸺
Accident I call it, in compliance to a received mode of speaking⸻but in no opposition to the opinion either of Acrites or Mythogeras in this matter; I know they were both prepossessed and fully persuaded of it—and are so to this hour, That there was nothing of accident in the whole event⸺but that the chesnut’s taking that particular course and in a manner of its own accord—and then falling with all its heat directly into that one particular place, and no other⸺was a real judgment upon Phutatorius , for that filthy and obscene treatise de Concubinis retinendis , which Phutatorius had published about twenty years ago⸺and was that identical week going to give the world a second edition of.