----Bless my soul! --my poor mistress is ready to faint----and her pains are gone--and the drops are done--and the bottle of julap is broke----and the nurse has cut her arm--(and I, my thumb, cried Dr. _Slop_,) and the child is where it was, continued _Susannah_, --and the midwife has fallen backwards upon the edge of the fender, and bruised her hip as black as your hat. --I’ll look at it, quoth Dr. _Slop_. --There is no need of that, replied _Susannah_, --you had better look at my mistress--but the midwife would gladly first give you an account how things are, so desires you would go up stairs and speak to her this moment. Human nature is the same in all professions. The midwife had just before been put over Dr. _Slop’s_ head --He had not digested it, --No, replied Dr. _Slop_, ’twould be full as proper, if the midwife came down to me. --I like subordination, quoth my uncle _Toby_, --and but for it, after the reduction of _Lisle_, I know not what might have become of the garrison of _Ghent_, in the mutiny for bread, in the year Ten. --Nor, replied Dr. _Slop_, (parodying my uncle _Toby’s_ hobby-horsical reflection; though full as hobby-horsical himself)------do I know, Captain _Shandy_, what might have become of the garrison above stairs, in the mutiny and confusion I find all things are in at present, but for the subordination of fingers and thumbs to ******------the application of which, Sir, under this accident of mine, comes in so _à propos_, that without it, the cut upon my thumb might have been felt by the _Shandy_ family, as long as the _Shandy_ family had a name. CHAPTER XIV Let us go back to the ******----in the last chapter. It is a singular stroke of eloquence (at least it was so, when eloquence flourished at _Athens_ and _Rome_, and would be so now, did orators wear mantles) not to mention the name of a thing, when you had the thing about you _in petto_, ready to produce, pop, in the place you want it. A scar, an axe, a sword, a pink’d doublet, a rusty helmet, a pound and a half of pot-ashes in an urn, or a three-halfpenny pickle pot--but above all, a tender infant royally accoutred. --Tho’ if it was too young, and the oration as long as _Tully’s_ second _Philippick_--it must certainly have beshit the orator’s mantle. --And then again, if too old, --it must have been unwieldy and incommodious to his action--so as to make him lose by his child almost as much as he could gain by it. --Otherwise, when a state orator has hit the precise age to a minute----hid his BAMBINO in his mantle so cunningly that no mortal could smell it----and produced it so critically, that no soul could say, it came in by head and shoulders --Oh Sirs! it has done wonders --It has open’d the sluices, and turn’d the brains, and shook the principles, and unhinged the politicks of half a nation.