⸺It answered prodigiously the next summer⸺the town was a perfect Proteus ⸺It was Landen , and Trerebach , and Santvliet , and Drusen , and Hagenau ,—and then it was Ostend and Menin , and Aeth and Dendermond .
⸺Surely never did any town act so many parts, since Sodom and Gomorah , as my uncle Toby’s town did.
In the fourth year, my uncle Toby thinking a town looked foolishly without a church, added a very fine one with a steeple.⸺ Trim was for having bells in it;⸺my uncle Toby said, the metal had better be cast into cannon.
This led the way the next campaign for half a dozen brass field-pieces, to be planted three and three on each side of my uncle Toby’s sentry-box; and in a short time, these led the way for a train of somewhat larger,—and so on—(as must always be the case in hobbyhorsical affairs) from pieces of half an inch bore, till it came at last to my father’s jack boots.
The next year, which was that in which Lisle was besieged, and at the close of which both Ghent and Bruges fell into our hands,—my uncle Toby was sadly put to it for proper ammunition;⸺I say proper ammunition⸺because his great artillery would not bear powder; and ’twas well for the Shandy family they would not⸺For so full were the papers, from the beginning to the end of the siege, of the incessant firings kept up by the besiegers,⸺and so heated was my uncle Toby’s imagination with the accounts of them, that he had infallibly shot away all his estate.
Something therefore was wanting as a succedaneum, especially in one or two of the more violent paroxysms of the siege, to keep up something like a continual firing in the imagination,⸺and this something , the corporal, whose principal strength lay in invention, supplied by an entire new system of battering of his own,—without which, this had been