of the soil,—the nature of the work itself,—and above all, the good-nature of my uncle Toby sitting by from morning to night, and chatting kindly with the corporal upon past-done deeds,—left labour little else but the ceremony of the name.
When the place was finished in this manner, and put into a proper posture of defence,—it was invested,—and my uncle Toby and the corporal began to run their first parallel.⸺I beg I may not be interrupted in my story, by being told, That the first parallel should be at least three hundred toises distant from the main body of the place,—and that I have not left a single inch for it ;⸻for my uncle Toby took the liberty of encroaching upon his kitchen-garden, for the sake of enlarging his works on the bowling-green, and for that reason generally ran his first and second parallels betwixt two rows of his cabbages and his cauliflowers; the conveniences and inconveniences of which will be considered at large in the history of my uncle Toby’s and the corporal’s campaigns, of which, this I’m now writing is but a sketch, and will be finished, if I conjecture right, in three pages (but there is no guessing)⸺The campaigns themselves will take up as many books; and therefore I apprehend it would be hanging too great a weight of one kind of matter in so flimsy a performance as this, to rhapsodize them, as I once intended, into the body of the work⸺surely they had better be printed apart,⸺we’ll consider the affair⸺so take the following sketch of them in the meantime.