It is not my business to dip my pen in this controversy⸺much undoubtedly may be wrote on both sides of the question—all that concerns me as an historian, is to represent the matter of fact, and render it credible to the reader, that the hiatus in Phutatorius’s breeches was sufficiently wide to receive the chesnut;⸺and that the chesnut, somehow or other, did fall perpendicularly and piping hot into it, without Phutatorius’s perceiving it, or anyone else at that time.
The genial warmth which the chesnut imparted, was not undelectable for the first twenty or five-and-twenty seconds⸺and did no more than gently solicit Phutatorius’s attention towards the part:⸻But the heat gradually increasing, and in a few seconds more getting beyond the point of all sober pleasure, and then advancing with all speed into the regions of pain, the soul of Phutatorius , together with all his ideas, his thoughts, his attention, his imagination, judgment, resolution, deliberation, ratiocination, memory, fancy, with ten battalions of animal spirits, all tumultuously crowded down, through different defiles and circuits, to the place of danger, leaving all his upper regions, as you may imagine, as empty as my purse.
With the best intelligence which all these messengers could bring him back, Phutatorius was not able to dive into the secret of what was going forwards below, nor could he make any kind of conjecture, what the devil was the matter with it: However, as he knew not what the true cause might turn out, he deemed it most prudent, in the situation he was in at present, to bear it, if possible, like a Stoick; which, with the help of some wry faces and compursions of the mouth, he had certainly accomplished, had his imagination continued neuter;⸺but the sallies of the imagination are ungovernable in things of this kind—a thought instantly darted into his mind, that though the anguish had the sensation