The city of Limerick , the siege of which was begun under his majesty king William himself, the year after I went into the army—lies, an’ please your honours, in the middle of a devilish wet, swampy country.—’Tis quite surrounded, said my uncle Toby , with the Shannon , and is, by its situation, one of the strongest fortified places in Ireland .⸺
I think this is a new fashion, quoth Dr. Slop , of beginning a medical lecture.—’Tis all true, answered Trim .—Then I wish the faculty would follow the cut of it, said Yorick .—’Tis all cut through, an’ please your reverence, said the corporal, with drains and bogs; and besides, there was such a quantity of rain fell during the siege, the whole country was like a puddle,—’twas that, and nothing else, which brought on the flux, and which had like to have killed both his honour and myself; now there was no such thing, after the first ten days, continued the corporal, for a soldier to lie dry in his tent, without cutting a ditch round it, to draw off the water;—nor was that enough, for those who could afford it, as his honour could, without setting fire every night to a pewter dish full of brandy, which took off the damp of the air, and made the inside of the tent as warm as a stove.⸻
And what conclusion dost thou draw, corporal Trim , cried my father, from all these premises?
I infer, an’ please your worship, replied Trim , that the radical moisture is nothing in the world but ditch-water—and that the radical heat, of those who can go to the expense of it, is burnt brandy,—the radical heat and moisture of a private man, an’ please your honour, is nothing but ditch-water—and a dram of geneva⸺and give us but enough of it, with a pipe of tobacco, to give us spirits, and drive away the vapours—we know not what it is to fear death.