When _Susannah_ told the corporal the misadventure of the sash, with all the circumstances which attended the _murder_ of me, --(as she called it)-- the blood forsook his cheeks, --all accessaries in murder being principals, --_Trim’s_ conscience told him he was as much to blame as _Susannah_, --and if the doctrine had been true, my uncle _Toby_ had as much of the bloodshed to answer for to heaven, as either of ’em; --so that neither reason or instinct, separate or together, could possibly have guided _Susannah’s_ steps to so proper an asylum. It is in vain to leave this to the Reader’s imagination: --to form any kind of hypothesis that will render these propositions feasible, he must cudgel his brains sore, --and to do it without, --he must have such brains as no reader ever had before him. ----Why should I put them either to trial or to torture? ’Tis my own affair: I’ll explain it myself. CHAPTER XIX ’Tis a pity, _Trim_, said my uncle _Toby_, resting with his hand upon the corporal’s shoulder, as they both stood surveying their works, --that we have not a couple of field-pieces to mount in the gorge of that new redoubt; ----’twould secure the lines all along there, and make the attack on that side quite complete: ----get me a couple cast, _Trim_. Your honour shall have them, replied _Trim_, before to-morrow morning. It was the joy of _Trim’s_ heart, --nor was his fertile head ever at a loss for expedients in doing it, to supply my uncle _Toby_ in his campaigns, with whatever his fancy called for; had it been his last crown, he would have sate down and hammered it into a paderero, to have prevented a single wish in his Master. The corporal had already, --what with cutting off the ends of my uncle _Toby’s_ spouts--hacking and chiseling up the sides of his leaden gutters, --melting down his pewter shaving-bason, --and going at last, like _Lewis_ the Fourteenth, on to the top of the church, for spare ends, &c. ----he had that very campaign brought no less than eight new battering cannons, besides three demi-culverins, into the field; my uncle _Toby’s_ demand for two more pieces for the redoubt, had set the corporal at work again; and no better resource offering, he had taken the two leaden weights from the nursery window: and as the sash pullies, when the lead was gone, were of no kind of use, he had taken them away also, to make a couple of wheels for one of their carriages. He had dismantled every sash-window in my uncle _Toby’s_ house long before, in the very same way, --though not always in the same order; for sometimes the pullies have been wanted, and not the lead, --so then he began with the pullies, --and the pullies being picked out, then the lead became useless, --and so the lead went to pot too. ----A great MORAL might be picked handsomely out of this, but I have not time--’tis enough to say, wherever the demolition began, ’twas equally fatal to the sash window. CHAPTER XX