Ægina behind, and Megara before, and Pyræus on the right hand, etc. , etc. , was nothing more than the true course of my father’s voyage and reflections.—’Twas certainly in his manner , and many an undertaking critic would have built two stories higher upon worse foundations.—And pray, brother, quoth my uncle Toby , laying the end of his pipe upon my father’s hand in a kindly way of interruption—but waiting till he finished the account—what year of our Lord was this?—’Twas no year of our Lord, replied my father.—That’s impossible, cried my uncle Toby .—Simpleton! said my father,—’twas forty years before Christ was born.
My uncle Toby had but two things for it; either to suppose his brother to be the wandering Jew , or that his misfortunes had disordered his brain.—“May the Lord God of heaven and earth protect him and restore him,” said my uncle Toby , praying silently for my father, and with tears in his eyes.
—My father placed the tears to a proper account, and went on with his harangue with great spirit.
“There is not such great odds, brother Toby , betwixt good and evil, as the world imagines”⸺(this way of setting off, by the by, was not likely to cure my uncle Toby’s suspicions.)⸺“Labour, sorrow, grief, sickness, want, and woe, are the sauces of life.”—Much good may it do them—said my uncle Toby to himself.⸻
“My son is dead!—so much the better;—’tis a shame in such a tempest to have but one anchor.”
“But he is gone forever from us!—be it so. He is got from under the hands of his barber before he was bald—he is but risen from a feast before he was surfeited—from a banquet before he had got drunken.”
“The Thracians wept when a child was born”—(and we were very near it, quoth my uncle Toby )—“and feasted and made merry when a