My mother, you must know———but I have fifty things more necessary to let you know first—I have a hundred difficulties which I have promised to clear up, and a thousand distresses and domestick misadventures crowding in upon me thick and threefold, one upon the neck of another. A cow broke in (tomorrow morning) to my uncle _Toby_’s fortifications, and eat up two rations and a half of dried grass, tearing up the sods with it, which faced his horn-work and covered way.——_Trim_ insists upon being tried by a court-martial—the cow to be shot—_Slop_ to be _crucifix’d_—myself to be _tristram’d_ and at my very baptism made a martyr of;——poor unhappy devils that we all are!——I want swaddling——but there is no time to be lost in exclamations——I have left my father lying across his bed, and my uncle _Toby_ in his old fringed chair, sitting beside him, and promised I would go back to them in half an hour; and five-and-thirty minutes are laps’d already.——Of all the perplexities a mortal author was ever seen in—this certainly is the greatest, for I have _Hafen Slawkenbergius_’s folio, Sir, to finish——a dialogue between my father and my uncle _Toby_, upon the solution of _Prignitz, Scroderus, Ambrose Paræus, Panocrates_, and _Grangousier_ to relate—a tale out of _Slawkenbergius_ to translate, and all this in five minutes less than no time at all;——such a head!—would to Heaven my enemies only saw the inside of it! C H A P. XXXII THERE was not any one scene more entertaining in our family—and to do it justice in this point;——and I here put off my cap and lay it upon the table close beside my ink-horn, on purpose to make my declaration to the world concerning this one article the more solemn——that I believe in my soul (unless my love and partiality to my understanding blinds me) the hand of the supreme Maker and first Designer of all things never made or put a family together (in that period at least of it which I have sat down to write the story of)——where the characters of it were cast or contrasted with so dramatick a felicity as ours was, for this end; or in which the capacities of affording such exquisite scenes, and the powers of shifting them perpetually from morning to night, were lodged and intrusted with so unlimited a confidence, as in the SHANDY FAMILY. Not any one of these was more diverting, I say, in this whimsical theatre of ours——than what frequently arose out of this self-same chapter of long noses——especially when my father’s imagination was heated with the enquiry, and nothing would serve him but to heat my uncle _Toby_’s too. My uncle _Toby_ would give my father all possible fair play in this attempt; and with infinite patience would sit smoking his pipe for whole hours together, whilst my father was practising upon his head, and trying every accessible avenue to drive _Prignitz_ and _Scroderus_’s solutions into it.