Well, my good doctor, cried my father sportively, for the transitions of his passions were unaccountably sudden,—and what has this whelp of mine to say to the matter? Had my father been asking after the amputation of the tail of a puppy-dog—he could not have done it in a more careless air: the system which Dr. _Slop_ had laid down, to treat the accident by, no way allowed of such a mode of enquiry.—He sat down. Pray, Sir, quoth my uncle _Toby_, in a manner which could not go unanswered,—in what condition is the boy?—’Twill end in a _phimosis_, replied Dr. _Slop._ I am no wiser than I was, quoth my uncle _Toby_—returning his pipe into his mouth.——Then let the corporal go on, said my father, with his medical lecture.—The corporal made a bow to his old friend, Dr. _Slop_, and then delivered his opinion concerning radical heat and radical moisture, in the following words. C H A P. XL THE city of _Limerick_, the siege of which was begun under his majesty king _William_ himself, the year after I went into the army—lies, an’ please your honours, in the middle of a devilish wet, swampy country.—’Tis quite surrounded, said my uncle _Toby_, with the _Shannon_, and is, by its situation, one of the strongest fortified places in _Ireland._—— I think this is a new fashion, quoth Dr. _Slop_, of beginning a medical lecture.—’Tis all true, answered _Trim._—Then I wish the faculty would follow the cut of it, said _Yorick._—’Tis all cut through, an’ please your reverence, said the corporal, with drains and bogs; and besides, there was such a quantity of rain fell during the siege, the whole country was like a puddle,—’twas that, and nothing else, which brought on the flux, and which had like to have killed both his honour and myself; now there was no such thing, after the first ten days, continued the corporal, for a soldier to lie dry in his tent, without cutting a ditch round it, to draw off the water;—nor was that enough, for those who could afford it, as his honour could, without setting fire every night to a pewter dish full of brandy, which took off the damp of the air, and made the inside of the tent as warm as a stove.—— And what conclusion dost thou draw, corporal _Trim_, cried my father, from all these premises? I infer, an’ please your worship, replied _Trim_, that the radical moisture is nothing in the world but ditch-water—and that the radical heat, of those who can go to the expence of it, is burnt brandy,—the radical heat and moisture of a private man, an’ please your honour, is nothing but ditch-water—and a dram of geneva——and give us but enough of it, with a pipe of tobacco, to give us spirits, and drive away the vapours—we know not what it is to fear death. I am at a loss, Captain _Shandy_, quoth Doctor _Slop_, to determine in which branch of learning your servant shines most, whether in physiology or divinity.—_Slop_ had not forgot _Trim_’s comment upon the sermon.—