CHAPTER VI

I wish my uncle _Toby_ had been a water-drinker; for then the thing had been accounted for, That the first moment Widow _Wadman_ saw him, she felt something stirring within her in his favour --Something! --something.

--Something perhaps more than friendship--less than love--something--no matter what--no matter where --I would not give a single hair off my mule’s tail, and be obliged to pluck it off myself (indeed the villain has not many to spare, and is not a little vicious into the bargain), to be let by your worships into the secret----

But the truth is, my uncle _Toby_ was not a water-drinker; he drank it neither pure nor mix’d, or any how, or any where, except fortuitously upon some advanced posts, where better liquor was not to be had----or during the time he was under cure; when the surgeon telling him it would extend the fibres, and bring them sooner into contact----my uncle _Toby_ drank it for quietness sake.

Now as all the world knows, that no effect in nature can be produced without a cause, and as it is as well known, that my uncle _Toby_ was neither a weaver--a gardener, or a gladiator----unless as a captain, you will needs have him one--but then he was only a captain of foot--and besides, the whole is an equivocation ----There is nothing left for us to suppose, but that my uncle _Toby’s_ leg----but that will avail us little in the present hypothesis, unless it had proceeded from some ailment _in the foot_--whereas his leg was not emaciated from any disorder in his foot--for my uncle _Toby’s_ leg was not emaciated at all. It was a little stiff and awkward, from a total disuse of it, for the three years he lay confined at my father’s house in town; but it was plump and muscular, and in all other respects as good and promising a leg as the other.

I declare, I do not recollect any one opinion or passage of my life, where my understanding was more at a loss to make ends meet, and torture the