By all that’s good! said my father, swearing, as he came to himself, and taking the oath out of _Ernulphus’s_ digest of curses----(though to do my father justice it was a fault (as he told Dr. _Slop_ in the affair of _Ernulphus_) which he as seldom committed as any man upon earth) ------By all that’s good and great! brother _Toby_, said my father, if it was not for the aids of philosophy, which befriend one so much as they do--you would put a man beside all temper. ----Why, by the _solutions_ of noses, of which I was telling you, I meant, as you might have known, had you favoured me with one grain of attention, the various accounts which learned men of different kinds of knowledge have given the world of the causes of short and long noses. ----There is no cause but one, replied my uncle _Toby_----why one man’s nose is longer than another’s, but because that God pleases to have it so. ----That is _Grangousier’s_ solution, said my father. --’Tis he, continued my uncle _Toby_, looking up, and not regarding my father’s interruption, who makes us all, and frames and puts us together in such forms and proportions, and for such ends, as is agreeable to his infinite wisdom. ----’Tis a pious account, cried my father, but not philosophical----there is more religion in it than sound science. ’Twas no inconsistent part of my uncle _Toby’s_ character----that he feared God, and reverenced religion. ----So the moment my father finished his remark----my uncle _Toby_ fell a whistling _Lillabullero_ with more zeal (though more out of tune) than usual.-- What is become of my wife’s thread-paper? CHAPTER XLII No matter--as an appendage to seamstressy, the thread-paper might be of some consequence to my mother--of none to my father, as a mark in _Slawkenbergius_. _Slawkenbergius_ in every page of him was a rich treasure of inexhaustible knowledge to my father--he could not open him amiss; and he would often say in closing the book, that if all the arts and sciences in the world, with the books which treated of them, were lost--should the wisdom and policies of governments, he would say, through disuse, ever happen to be forgot, and all that statesmen had wrote or caused to be written, upon the strong or the weak sides of courts and kingdoms, should they be forgot also--and _Slawkenbergius_ only left----there would be enough in him in all conscience, he would say, to set the world a-going again. A treasure therefore was he indeed! an institute of all that was necessary to be known of noses, and everything else--at _matin_, noon, and vespers was _Hafen Slawkenbergius_ his recreation and delight: ’twas for ever in his hands----you would have sworn, Sir, it had been a canon’s prayer-book--so worn, so glazed, so contrited and attrited was it with fingers and with thumbs in all its parts, from one end even unto the other.