One or two who had very nice ears, and could distinguish the expression and mixture of the two tones as plainly as a _third_ or a _fifth_, or any other chord in musick--were the most puzzled and perplexed with it--the concord was good in itself--but then ’twas quite out of the key, and no way applicable to the subject started; ----so that with all their knowledge, they could not tell what in the world to make of it. Others who knew nothing of musical expression, and merely lent their ears to the plain import of the _word_, imagined that _Phutatorius_, who was somewhat of a cholerick spirit, was just going to snatch the cudgels out of _Didius’s_ hands, in order to bemaul _Yorick_ to some purpose--and that the desperate monosyllable Z------ds was the exordium to an oration, which, as they judged from the sample, presaged but a rough kind of handling of him; so that my uncle _Toby’s_ good-nature felt a pang for what _Yorick_ was about to undergo. But seeing _Phutatorius_ stop short, without any attempt or desire to go on--a third party began to suppose, that it was no more than an involuntary respiration, casually forming itself into the shape of a twelve-penny oath--without the sin or substance of one. Others, and especially one or two who sat next him, looked upon it on the contrary as a real and substantial oath, propensly formed against _Yorick_, to whom he was known to bear no good liking--which said oath, as my father philosophized upon it, actually lay fretting and fuming at that very time in the upper regions of _Phutatorius’s_ purtenance; and so was naturally, and according to the due course of things, first squeezed out by the sudden influx of blood which was driven into the right ventricle of _Phutatorius’s_ heart, by the stroke of surprize which so strange a theory of preaching had excited. How finely we argue upon mistaken facts!