I will not argue the matter: Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more——everything presses on——whilst thou art twisting that lock,——see! it grows grey; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.——
——Heaven have mercy upon us both!
[ CHAPTER IX]
Now, for what the world thinks of that ejaculation——I would not give a groat.
[ CHAPTER X]
My mother had gone with her left arm twisted in my father’s right, till they had got to the fatal angle of the old garden wall, where Doctor Slop was overthrown by Obadiah on the coach-horse: as this was directly opposite to the front of Mrs. Wadman’s house, when my father came to it, he gave a look across; and seeing my uncle Toby and the corporal within ten paces of the door, he turn’d about——“Let us just stop a moment, quoth my father, and see with what ceremonies my brother Toby and his man Trim make their first entry——it will not detain us, added my father, a single minute:”——No matter, if it be ten minutes, quoth my mother.
——It will not detain us half one; said my father.
The corporal was just then setting in with the story of his brother Tom and the Jew’s widow: the story went on—and on——it had episodes in it——it came back, and went on——and on again; there was no end of it——the reader found it very long——
——G— help my father! he pish’d fifty times at every new attitude, and gave the corporal’s stick, with all its flourishings and dangling, to as many devils as chose to accept of them.
When issues of events like these my father is waiting for, are hanging in the scales of fate, the mind has the advantage of changing the principle of expectation three times, without which it would not have power to see it out.