This clue will unravel what otherwise would seem very inconsistent in my father’s domestic character; and it is this, that, in the provocations arising from the neglects and blunders of servants, or other mishaps unavoidable in a family, his anger or rather the duration of it, eternally ran counter to all conjecture. My father had a favourite little mare, which he had consigned over to a most beautiful Arabian horse, in order to have a pad out of her for his own riding: he was sanguine in all his projects; so talked about his pad every day with as absolute a security, as if it had been reared, broke, --and bridled and saddled at his door ready for mounting. By some neglect or other in _Obadiah_, it so fell out, that my father’s expectations were answered with nothing better than a mule, and as ugly a beast of the kind as ever was produced. My mother and my uncle _Toby_ expected my father would be the death of _Obadiah_--and that there never would be an end of the disaster. ----See here! you rascal, cried my father, pointing to the mule, what you have done! ----It was not me, said _Obadiah_. ----How do I know that? replied my father. Triumph swam in my father’s eyes, at the repartee--the _Attic_ salt brought water into them--and so _Obadiah_ heard no more about it. Now let us go back to my brother’s death. Philosophy has a fine saying for everything. --For _Death_ it has an entire set; the misery was, they all at once rushed into my father’s head, that ’twas difficult to string them together, so as to make anything of a consistent show out of them. --He took them as they came. “’Tis an inevitable chance--the first statute in _Magna Charta_--it is an everlasting act of parliament, my dear brother, ----_All must die._ “If my son could not have died, it had been matter of wonder, --not that he is dead. “Monarchs and princes dance in the same ring with us. “--_To die_, is the great debt and tribute due unto nature: tombs and monuments, which should perpetuate our memories, pay it themselves; and the proudest pyramid of them all, which wealth and science have erected, has lost its apex, and stands obtruncated in the traveller’s horizon.” (My father found he got great ease, and went on)-- “Kingdoms and provinces, and towns and cities, have they not their periods? and when those principles and powers, which at first cemented and put them together, have performed their several evolutions, they fall back.” --Brother _Shandy_, said my uncle _Toby_, laying down his pipe at the word _evolutions_ --Revolutions, I meant, quoth my father, --by heaven! I meant revolutions, brother _Toby_--evolutions is nonsense. ----’Tis not nonsense, --said my uncle _Toby_. ----But is it not nonsense to break the thread of such a discourse upon such an occasion? cried my father--do not--dear _Toby_, continued he, taking him by the hand, do not--do not, I beseech thee, interrupt me at this crisis. ----My uncle _Toby_ put his pipe into his mouth.