Chapter C: H a P. XVII

——’TWAS nothing,—I did not lose two drops of blood by it——’twas not worth calling in a surgeon, had he lived next door to us——thousands suffer by choice, what I did by accident.——Doctor _Slop_ made ten times more of it, than there was occasion:——some men rise, by the art of hanging great weights upon small wires,—and I am this day (_August_ the 10th, 1761) paying part of the price of this man’s reputation.——O ’twould provoke a stone, to see how things are carried on in this world!——The chamber-maid had left no ******* *** under the bed:——Cannot you contrive, master, quoth _Susannah_, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up into the window-seat with the other,—cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time, to **** *** ** *** ****** ?

I was five years old.——_Susannah_ did not consider that nothing was well hung in our family,——so slap came the sash down like lightning upon us;—Nothing is left,—cried _Susannah_,—nothing is left—for me, but to run my country.——

My uncle _Toby_’s house was a much kinder sanctuary; and so _Susannah_ fled to it.

C H A P. XVIII

WHEN _Susannah_ told the corporal the misadventure of the sash, with all the circumstances which attended the _murder_ of me,—(as she called it,)—the blood forsook his cheeks,—all accessaries in murder being principals,—_Trim_’s conscience told him he was as much to blame as _Susannah_,—and if the doctrine had been true, my uncle _Toby_ had as much of the bloodshed to answer for to heaven, as either of ’em;—so that neither reason or instinct, separate or together, could possibly have guided _Susannah_’s steps to so proper an asylum. It is in vain to leave this to the Reader’s imagination:——to form any kind of hypothesis that will render these propositions feasible, he must cudgel his brains sore,—and to do it without,—he must have such brains as no reader ever had before him.—Why should I put them either to trial or to torture? ’Tis my own affair: I’ll explain it myself.