If I durst presume, continued _Trim_, to give your Honour my advice, and speak my opinion in this matter.—Thou art welcome, _Trim_, quoth my uncle _Toby_—speak,——speak what thou thinkest upon the subject, man, without fear.—Why then, replied _Trim_, (not hanging his ears and scratching his head like a country-lout, but) stroking his hair back from his forehead, and standing erect as before his division,—I think, quoth _Trim_, advancing his left, which was his lame leg, a little forwards,—and pointing with his right hand open towards a map of _Dunkirk_, which was pinned against the hangings,——I think, quoth Corporal _Trim_, with humble submission to your Honour’s better judgment,——that these ravelins, bastions, curtins, and hornworks, make but a poor, contemptible, fiddle-faddle piece of work of it here upon paper, compared to what your Honour and I could make of it were we in the country by ourselves, and had but a rood, or a rood and a half of ground to do what we pleased with: As summer is coming on, continued _Trim_, your Honour might sit out of doors, and give me the nography—(Call it ichnography, quoth my uncle,)——of the town or citadel, your Honour was pleased to sit down before,—and I will be shot by your Honour upon the glacis of it, if I did not fortify it to your Honour’s mind.——I dare say thou would’st, _Trim_, quoth my uncle.—For if your Honour, continued the Corporal, could but mark me the polygon, with its exact lines and angles—That I could do very well, quoth my uncle.—I would begin with the fossé, and if your Honour could tell me the proper depth and breadth—I can to a hair’s breadth, _Trim_, replied my uncle.—I would throw out the earth upon this hand towards the town for the scarp,—and on that hand towards the campaign for the counterscarp.—Very right, _Trim_, quoth my uncle _Toby_:—And when I had sloped them to your mind,——an’ please your Honour, I would face the glacis, as the finest fortifications are done in _Flanders_, with sods,——and as your Honour knows they should be,—and I would make the walls and parapets with sods too.—The best engineers call them gazons, _Trim_, said my uncle _Toby._—Whether they are gazons or sods, is not much matter, replied _Trim_; your Honour knows they are ten times beyond a facing either of brick or stone.——I know they are, _Trim_ in some respects,——quoth my uncle _Toby_, nodding his head;—for a cannon-ball enters into the gazon right onwards, without bringing any rubbish down with it, which might fill the fossé, (as was the case at _St. Nicolas_’s gate) and facilitate the passage over it.