Chapter I: AM a Turk if I had not as much forgot my mother, as if Nature had

plaistered me up, and set me down naked upon the banks of the river _Nile_, without one.——Your most obedient servant, Madam—I’ve cost you a great deal of trouble,—I wish it may answer;—but you have left a crack in my back,—and here’s a great piece fallen off here before,—and what must I do with this foot?——I shall never reach _England_ with it.

For my own part, I never wonder at any thing;—and so often has my judgment deceived me in my life, that I always suspect it, right or wrong,—at least I am seldom hot upon cold subjects. For all this, I reverence truth as much as any body; and when it has slipped us, if a man will but take me by the hand, and go quietly and search for it, as for a thing we have both lost, and can neither of us do well without,—I’ll go to the world’s end with him:——But I hate disputes,—and therefore (bating religious points, or such as touch society) I would almost subscribe to any thing which does not choak me in the first passage, rather than be drawn into one——But I cannot bear suffocation,——and bad smells worst of all.——For which reasons, I resolved from the beginning, That if ever the army of martyrs was to be augmented,—or a new-one raised,—I would have no hand in it, one way or t’other.