If I durst presume, continued _Trim_, to give your Honour my advice, and speak my opinion in this matter. --Thou art welcome, _Trim_, quoth my uncle _Toby_--speak, ----speak what thou thinkest upon the subject, man, without fear. Why then, replied _Trim_ (not hanging his ears and scratching his head like a country-lout, but) stroking his hair back from his forehead, and standing erect as before his division, --I think, quoth _Trim_, advancing his left, which was his lame leg, a little forwards, --and pointing with his right hand open towards a map of _Dunkirk_, which was pinned against the hangings, ----I think, quoth Corporal _Trim_, with humble submission to your Honour’s better judgment, ----that these ravelins, bastions, curtins, and horn-works, make but a poor, contemptible, fiddle-faddle piece of work of it here upon paper, compared to what your Honour and I could make of it were we in the country by ourselves, and had but a rood, or a rood and a half of ground to do what we pleased with: As summer is coming on, continued _Trim_, your Honour might sit out of doors, and give me the nography--(Call it ichnography, quoth my uncle)----of the town or citadel, your Honour was pleased to sit down before, --and I will be shot by your Honour upon the glacis of it, if I did not fortify it to your Honour’s mind ----I dare say thou would’st, _Trim_, quoth my uncle. --For if your Honour, continued the Corporal, could but mark me the polygon, with its exact lines and angles --That I could do very well, quoth my uncle. --I would begin with the fossé, and if your Honour could tell me the proper depth and breadth --I can to a hair’s breadth, _Trim_, replied my uncle. --I would throw out the earth upon this hand towards the town for the scarp, --and on that hand towards the campaign for the counterscarp. --Very right, _Trim_, quoth my uncle _Toby_: ----And when I had sloped them to your mind, ----an’ please your Honour, I would face the glacis, as the finest fortifications are done in _Flanders_, with sods, ----and as your Honour knows they should be, --and I would make the walls and parapets with sods too. --The best engineers call them gazons, _Trim_, said my uncle _Toby_. ----Whether they are gazons or sods, is not much matter, replied _Trim_; your Honour knows they are ten times beyond a facing either of brick or stone. ----I know they are, _Trim_, in some respects, ----quoth my uncle _Toby_, nodding his head; --for a cannon-ball enters into the gazon right onwards, without bringing any rubbish down with it, which might fill the fossé (as was the case at _St. Nicolas’s_ gate), and facilitate the passage over it.