In this track of happiness for many years, without one interruption to it, except now and then when the wind continued to blow due west for a week or ten days together, which detained the Flanders mail, and kept them so long in torture,—but still ’twas the torture of the happy⸺In this track, I say, did my uncle Toby and Trim move for many years, every year of which, and sometimes every month, from the invention of either the one or the other of them, adding some new conceit or quirk of improvement to their operations, which always opened fresh springs of delight in carrying them on.
The first year’s campaign was carried on from beginning to end, in the plain and simple method I’ve related.
In the second year, in which my uncle Toby took Liege and Ruremond , he thought he might afford the expense of four handsome drawbridges, of two of which I have given an exact description in the former part of my work.
At the latter end of the same year he added a couple of gates with portcullises:⸺These last were converted afterwards into orgues, as the better thing; and during the winter of the same year, my uncle Toby , instead of a new suit of clothes, which he always had at Christmas , treated himself with a handsome sentry-box, to stand at the corner of the bowling-green, betwixt which point and the foot of the glacis, there was left a little kind of an esplanade for him and the corporal to confer and hold councils of war upon.
⸺The sentry-box was in case of rain.
All these were painted white three times over the ensuing spring, which enabled my uncle Toby to take the field with great splendour.
My father would often say to Yorick , that if any mortal in the whole universe had done such a thing, except his brother Toby , it would have