Here then was the time to have put a stop to this persecution against him; ------and tried an experiment at least------whether calmness and serenity of mind in your sister, with a due attention, brother _Toby_, to her evacuations and repletions------and the rest of her non-naturals, might not, in a course of nine months gestation, have set all things to rights. ------My child was bereft of these! ------What a teazing life did she lead herself, and consequently her fœtus too, with that nonsensical anxiety of hers about lying-in in town? I thought my sister submitted with the greatest patience, replied my uncle _Toby_ --------I never heard her utter one fretful word about it. ------She fumed inwardly, cried my father; and that, let me tell you, brother, was ten times worse for the child--and then! what battles did she fight with me, and what perpetual storms about the midwife. ------There she gave vent, said my uncle _Toby_. ------Vent! cried my father, looking up. But what was all this, my dear _Toby_, to the injuries done us by my child’s coming head foremost into the world, when all I wished, in this general wreck of his frame, was to have saved this little casket unbroke, unrifled.------ With all my precautions, how was my system turned topside-turvy in the womb with my child! his head exposed to the hand of violence, and a pressure of 470 pounds avoirdupois weight acting so perpendicularly upon its apex--that at this hour ’tis ninety _per Cent._ insurance, that the fine net-work of the intellectual web be not rent and torn to a thousand tatters. ----Still we could have done. ----Fool, coxcomb, puppy----give him but a NOSE ----Cripple, Dwarf, Driveller, Goosecap------(shape him as you will) the door of fortune stands open--_O Licetus!_ _Licetus!_ had I been blest with a fœtus five inches long and a half, like thee --Fate might have done her worst. Still, brother _Toby_, there was one cast of the dye left for our child after all--_O Tristram!_ _Tristram!_ _Tristram!_ We will send for Mr. _Yorick_, said my uncle _Toby_. ----You may send for whom you will, replied my father. CHAPTER XX What a rate have I gone on at, curvetting and frisking it away, two up and two down for four volumes[4.8] together, without looking once behind, or even on one side of me, to see whom I trod upon! --I’ll tread upon no one----quoth I to myself when I mounted ------I’ll take a good rattling gallop; but I’ll not hurt the poorest jackass upon the road. ----So off I set----up one lane------down another, through this turnpike----over that, as if the arch-jockey of jockeys had got behind me.