This is the best account I am determined to give of the slow progress my father made in his _Tristra-pædia;_ at which (as I said) he was three years, and something more, indefatigably at work, and, at last, had scarce completed, by this own reckoning, one half of his undertaking: the misfortune was, that I was all that time totally neglected and abandoned to my mother; and what was almost as bad, by the very delay, the first part of the work, upon which my father had spent the most of his pains, was rendered entirely useless,——every day a page or two became of no consequence.—— ——Certainly it was ordained as a scourge upon the pride of human wisdom, That the wisest of us all should thus outwit ourselves, and eternally forego our purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them. In short my father was so long in all his acts of resistance,—or in other words,—he advanced so very slow with his work, and I began to live and get forwards at such a rate, that if an event had not happened,——which, when we get to it, if it can be told with decency, shall not be concealed a moment from the reader——I verily believe, I had put by my father, and left him drawing a sundial, for no better purpose than to be buried under ground. C H A P. XVII ——’TWAS nothing,—I did not lose two drops of blood by it——’twas not worth calling in a surgeon, had he lived next door to us——thousands suffer by choice, what I did by accident.——Doctor _Slop_ made ten times more of it, than there was occasion:——some men rise, by the art of hanging great weights upon small wires,—and I am this day (_August_ the 10th, 1761) paying part of the price of this man’s reputation.——O ’twould provoke a stone, to see how things are carried on in this world!——The chamber-maid had left no ******* *** under the bed:——Cannot you contrive, master, quoth _Susannah_, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up into the window-seat with the other,—cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time, to **** *** ** *** ****** ? I was five years old.——_Susannah_ did not consider that nothing was well hung in our family,——so slap came the sash down like lightning upon us;—Nothing is left,—cried _Susannah_,—nothing is left—for me, but to run my country.—— My uncle _Toby_’s house was a much kinder sanctuary; and so _Susannah_ fled to it. C H A P. XVIII