The misfortunes that had attended so persistently upon the career of Roger Sterne culminated at last most tragically, yet at the same time most ludicrously, as if Destiny had determined to the end to make the luckless ensign her sport. At Gibraltar a quarrel with another officer "about a goose" resulted in a duel. Roger Sterne was run through the body. He never recovered from the wound, and though in this harsh world he drew his breath {301} in pain a little longer, he died in Jamaica of fever, which found his enfeebled frame a ready victim. One of the few pleasing characteristics in Laurence Sterne's nature is his affectionate memory of his father; one of the most pleasing passages of all his writings is that in which he describes him. "My father was a little, smart man, active to the last degree in all exercises, most patient of fatigue and disappointment, of which it had pleased God to give him full measure. He was, in his temper, somewhat rapid and hasty"--hence, no doubt, the speaking of hot words and the spilling of hot blood over that ill-omened goose--"but of a kindly, sweet disposition, void of all design, and so innocent in his intentions that he suspected no one, so that you might have cheated him ten times a day if nine had not been sufficient for your purpose." [Sidenote: 1713-1768--"Tristram Shandy"] Through Halifax School and Cambridge sizarship Laurence Sterne passed, by the patronage of his pluralist uncle, Jacques Sterne, into holy orders and the living of Sutton-on-the-Forest, and so into twenty years of almost complete obscurity. We know that he married, that he preached, played the fiddle, fished, hunted, and read, and that is about all we know. Then quite suddenly, in 1759, the lazy, lounging, most eccentric, and ill-chosen clergyman enraptured London by the publication of the first two volumes of "Tristram Shandy."