not⸺and how I happen to be so lewd myself, particularly a little before the vernal and autumnal equinoxes⸺Heaven above knows⸺My mother⸺madam⸺was so at no time, either by nature, by institution, or example.
A temperate current of blood ran orderly through her veins in all months of the year, and in all critical moments both of the day and night alike; nor did she superinduce the least heat into her humours from the manual effervescencies of devotional tracts, which having little or no meaning in them, nature is ofttimes obliged to find one⸺And as for my father’s example! ’twas so far from being either aiding or abetting thereunto, that ’twas the whole business of his life to keep all fancies of that kind out of her head⸺Nature had done her part, to have spared him this trouble; and what was not a little inconsistent, my father knew it⸺And here am I sitting, this 12th day of August 1766, in a purple jerkin and yellow pair of slippers, without either wig or cap on, a most tragicomical completion of his prediction, “That I should neither think, nor act like any other man’s child, upon that very account.”
The mistake in my father, was in attacking my mother’s motive, instead of the act itself; for certainly keyholes were made for other purposes; and considering the act, as an act which interfered with a true proposition, and denied a keyhole to be what it was⸻it became a violation of nature; and was so far, you see, criminal.
It is for this reason, an’ please your Reverences, That keyholes are the occasions of more sin and wickedness, than all other holes in this world put together.
⸻which leads me to my uncle Toby’s amours.