Had the same great reasoner looked on, as my father illustrated his systems of noses, and observed my uncle _Toby_’s deportment—what great attention he gave to every word—and as oft as he took his pipe from his mouth, with what wonderful seriousness he contemplated the length of it——surveying it transversely as he held it betwixt his finger and his thumb——then fore-right——then this way, and then that, in all its possible directions and fore-shortenings——he would have concluded my uncle _Toby_ had got hold of the _medius terminus_, and was syllogizing and measuring with it the truth of each hypothesis of long noses, in order, as my father laid them before him. This, by-the-bye, was more than my father wanted——his aim in all the pains he was at in these philosophick lectures—was to enable my uncle _Toby_ not to _discuss_——but _comprehend_—to _hold_ the grains and scruples of learning——not to _weigh_ them.——My uncle _Toby_, as you will read in the next chapter, did neither the one or the other. C H A P. XXXIV ’TIS a pity, cried my father one winter’s night, after a three hours painful translation of _Slawkenbergius_——’tis a pity, cried my father, putting my mother’s threadpaper into the book for a mark, as he spoke——that truth, brother _Toby_, should shut herself up in such impregnable fastnesses, and be so obstinate as not to surrender herself sometimes up upon the closest siege.—— Now it happened then, as indeed it had often done before, that my uncle _Toby_’s fancy, during the time of my father’s explanation of _Prignitz_ to him——having nothing to stay it there, had taken a short flight to the bowling-green;——his body might as well have taken a turn there too—so that with all the semblance of a deep school-man intent upon the _medius terminus_——my uncle _Toby_ was in fact as ignorant of the whole lecture, and all its pros and cons, as if my father had been translating _Hafen Slawkenbergius_ from the _Latin_ tongue into the _Cherokee._ But the word _siege_, like a talismanic power, in my father’s metaphor, wafting back my uncle _Toby_’s fancy, quick as a note could follow the touch—he open’d his ears——and my father observing that he took his pipe out of his mouth, and shuffled his chair nearer the table, as with a desire to profit—my father with great pleasure began his sentence again——changing only the plan, and dropping the metaphor of the siege of it, to keep clear of some dangers my father apprehended from it. ’Tis a pity, said my father, that truth can only be on one side, brother _Toby_——considering what ingenuity these learned men have all shewn in their solutions of noses.——Can noses be dissolved? replied my uncle _Toby_.