My mother, you must know------but I have fifty things more necessary to let you know first ----I have a hundred difficulties which I have promised to clear up, and a thousand distresses and domestick misadventures crowding in upon me thick and threefold, one upon the neck of another. A cow broke in (to-morrow morning) to my uncle _Toby’s_ fortifications, and eat up two rations and a half of dried grass, tearing up the sods with it, which faced his horn-work and covered way. ----_Trim_ insists upon being tried by a court-martial--the cow to be shot--_Slop_ to be _crucifix’d_--myself to be _tristram’d_ and at my very baptism made a martyr of; ----poor unhappy devils that we all are! ----I want swaddling------but there is no time to be lost in exclamations ------I have left my father lying across his bed, and my uncle _Toby_ in his old fringed chair, sitting beside him, and promised I would go back to them in half an hour; and five-and-thirty minutes are laps’d already. ------Of all the perplexities a mortal author was ever seen in----this certainly is the greatest, for I have _Hafen Slawkenbergius’s_ folio, Sir, to finish----a dialogue between my father and my uncle _Toby_, upon the solution of _Prignitz_, _Scroderus_, _Ambrose Paræus_, _Ponocrates_, and _Grangousier_ to relate--a tale out of _Slawkenbergius_ to translate, and all this in five minutes less than no time at all; ------such a head! --would to Heaven my enemies only saw the inside of it! CHAPTER XXXIX There was not any one scene more entertaining in our family--and to do it justice in this point; ----and I here put off my cap and lay it upon the table close beside my ink-horn, on purpose to make my declaration to the world concerning this one article the more solemn----that I believe in my soul (unless my love and partiality to my understanding blinds me) the hand of the supreme Maker and first Designer of all things never made or put a family together (in that period at least of it which I have sat down to write the story of)----where the characters of it were cast or contrasted with so dramatick a felicity as ours was, for this end; or in which the capacities of affording such exquisite scenes, and the powers of shifting them perpetually from morning to night, were lodged and intrusted with so unlimited a confidence, as in the SHANDY FAMILY. Not any one of these was more diverting, I say, in this whimsical theatre of ours----than what frequently arose out of this self-same chapter of long noses------especially when my father’s imagination was heated with the enquiry, and nothing would serve him but to heat my uncle _Toby’s_ too. My uncle _Toby_ would give my father all possible fair play in this attempt; and with infinite patience would sit smoaking his pipe for whole hours together, whilst my father was practising upon his head, and trying every accessible avenue to drive _Prignitz_ and _Scroderus’s_ solutions into it.