I hope not, said _Trim_.--You hope not! cried _Susannah_ earnestly.--The mourning ran not in _Trim's_ head, whatever it did in _Susannah's_.--I hope--said _Trim_, explaining himself, I hope in God the news is not true--I heard the letter read with my own ears, answered _Obadiah_; and we shall have a terrible piece of work of it in stubbing the Ox-moor.--Oh! he's dead, said _Susannah_.--As sure, said the scullion, as I'm alive. I lament for him from my heart and my soul, said _Trim_, fetching a sigh.--Poor creature!--poor boy!--poor gentleman! --He was alive last _Whitsontide_! said the coachman.--_Whitsontide!_ alas! cried _Trim_, extending his right arm, and falling instantly into the same attitude in which he read the sermon,--what is _Whitsontide_, _Jonathan_ (for that was the coachman's name), or _Shrovetide_, or any tide or time past, to this? Are we not here now, continued the corporal (striking the end of his stick perpendicularly upon the floor, so as to give an idea of health and stability)--and are we not--(dropping his hat upon the ground) gone! in a moment!--'T was infinitely striking! _Susannah_ burst into a flood of tears.--We are not stocks and stones.--_Jonathan, Obadiah_, the cookmaid, all melted.--The foolish fat scullion herself, who was scouring a fish-kettle upon her knees, was rous'd with it.--The whole kitchen crowded about the corporal. There is the true Sterne. A common happening unites a half-dozen people in a sympathetic group, yet all the while each of them is living his individual life. You may look far and wide, but you will find nothing quite comparable to that fat, foolish scullion. And withal there is no touch of cynical satire in this display of egotism, but a kindly, quizzical sense of the way in which our human personalities are jumbled together in this strange world. And in the end the feeling that lies covered up in the heart of each, the feeling that all of us carry dumbly in the inevitable presence of death, is conveyed in that supreme gesture of Corporal Trim's, whose force in the book is magnified by the author's fantastic disquisition on its precise nature and significance.