[ CHAPTER XX]
We are now going to enter upon a new scene of events.———
——Leave we then the breeches in the taylor’s hands, with my father standing over him with his cane, reading him as he sat at work a lecture upon the latus clavus, and pointing to the precise part of the waistband, where he was determined to have it sewed on.——
Leave we my mother—(truest of all the Pococurantes of her sex!)—careless about it, as about everything else in the world which concerned her;—that is,—indifferent whether it was done this way or that,—provided it was but done at all.——
Leave we Slop likewise to the full profits of all my dishonours.———
Leave we poor Le Fever to recover, and get home from Marseilles as he can.——And last of all,—because the hardest of all——
Let us leave, if possible, myself:——But ’tis impossible,—I must go along with you to the end of the work.
[ CHAPTER XXI]
If the reader has not a clear conception of the rood and the half of ground which lay at the bottom of my uncle Toby’s kitchen-garden, and which was the scene of so many of his delicious hours,—the fault is not in me,—but in his imagination;—for I am sure I gave him so minute a description, I was almost ashamed of it.
When Fate was looking forwards one afternoon, into the great transactions of future times,—and recollected for what purposes this little plot, by a decree fast bound down in iron, had been destined,——she gave a nod to Nature,—’twas enough—Nature threw half a spade full of her kindliest compost upon it, with just so much clay in it, as to retain the forms of angles and indentings,—and so little of it too, as not to cling to the spade, and render works of so much glory, nasty in foul weather.