As my father’s _India_ handkerchief was in his right coat pocket, he should by no means have suffered his right hand to have got engaged: on the contrary, instead of taking off his wig with it, as he did, he ought to have committed that entirely to the left; and then, when the natural exigency my father was under of rubbing his head, called out for his handkerchief, he would have had nothing in the world to have done, but to have put his right hand into his right coat pocket and taken it out;——which he might have done without any violence, or the least ungraceful twist in any one tendon or muscle of his whole body. In this case, (unless, indeed, my father had been resolved to make a fool of himself by holding the wig stiff in his left hand——or by making some nonsensical angle or other at his elbow-joint, or armpit)—his whole attitude had been easy—natural—unforced: _Reynolds_ himself, as great and gracefully as he paints, might have painted him as he sat. Now as my father managed this matter,—consider what a devil of a figure my father made of himself. In the latter end of Queen _Anne_’s reign, and in the beginning of the reign of King _George_ the first—“_Coat pockets were cut very low down in the skirt._”—I need say no more—the father of mischief, had he been hammering at it a month, could not have contrived a worse fashion for one in my father’s situation. C H A P. XLVII IT was not an easy matter in any king’s reign (unless you were as lean a subject as myself) to have forced your hand diagonally, quite across your whole body, so as to gain the bottom of your opposite coat pocket.——In the year one thousand seven hundred and eighteen, when this happened, it was extremely difficult; so that when my uncle _Toby_ discovered the transverse zig-zaggery of my father’s approaches towards it, it instantly brought into his mind those he had done duty in, before the gate of _St. Nicolas_;—the idea of which drew off his attention so intirely from the subject in debate, that he had got his right hand to the bell to ring up _Trim_ to go and fetch his map of _Namur_, and his compasses and sector along with it, to measure the returning angles of the traverses of that attack,—but particularly of that one, where he received his wound upon his groin. My father knit his brows, and as he knit them, all the blood in his body seemed to rush up into his face——my uncle _Toby_ dismounted immediately. ——I did not apprehend your uncle _Toby_ was o’horseback.—— C H A P. XLVIII A MAN’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin’s lining;—rumple the one,—you rumple the other. There is one certain exception however in this case, and that is, when you are so fortunate a fellow, as to have had your jerkin made of gum-taffeta, and the body-lining to it of a sarcenet, or thin persian.