This led the way the next campaign for half a dozen brass field-pieces, to be planted three and three on each side of my uncle _Toby_’s sentry-box; and in a short time, these led the way for a train of somewhat larger,—and so on—(as must always be the case in hobby-horsical affairs) from pieces of half an inch bore, till it came at last to my father’s jack boots. The next year, which was that in which _Lisle_ was besieged, and at the close of which both _Ghent_ and _Bruges_ fell into our hands,—my uncle _Toby_ was sadly put to it for _proper_ ammunition;——I say proper ammunition——because his great artillery would not bear powder; and ’twas well for the _Shandy_ family they would not——For so full were the papers, from the beginning to the end of the siege, of the incessant firings kept up by the besiegers,——and so heated was my uncle _Toby_’s imagination with the accounts of them, that he had infallibly shot away all his estate. SOMETHING therefore was wanting as a _succedaneum_, especially in one or two of the more violent paroxysms of the siege, to keep up something like a continual firing in the imagination,——and this something, the corporal, whose principal strength lay in invention, supplied by an entire new system of battering of his own,—without which, this had been objected to by military critics, to the end of the world, as one of the great _desiderata_ of my uncle _Toby_’s apparatus. This will not be explained the worse, for setting off, as I generally do, at a little distance from the subject. C H A P. LXVII WITH two or three other trinkets, small in themselves, but of great regard, which poor _Tom_, the corporal’s unfortunate brother, had sent him over, with the account of his marriage with the _Jew_’s widow——there was A _Montero_-cap and two _Turkish_ tobacco-pipes. The _Montero_-cap I shall describe by and bye.—The _Turkish_ tobacco-pipes had nothing particular in them, they were fitted up and ornamented as usual, with flexible tubes of _Morocco_ leather and gold wire, and mounted at their ends, the one of them with ivory,—the other with black ebony, tipp’d with silver. My father, who saw all things in lights different from the rest of the world, would say to the corporal, that he ought to look upon these two presents more as tokens of his brother’s nicety, than his affection.——Tom did not care, _Trim_, he would say, to put on the cap, or to smoke in the tobacco-pipe of a _Jew._——God bless your honour, the corporal would say (giving a strong reason to the contrary)—how can that be? The Montero-cap was scarlet, of a superfine _Spanish_ cloth, dyed in grain, and mounted all round with fur, except about four inches in the front, which was faced with a light blue, slightly embroidered,—and seemed to have been the property of a _Portuguese_ quarter-master, not of foot, but of horse, as the word denotes.