Joseph Andrews and Parson Adams arrived at the inn in no cheery plight, the hero's leg having been injured by a propensity for performing unexpected genuflections, the pride of a horse borrowed by the parson for the occasion. The host, a surly fellow, treated the damaged Joseph with roughness, and Parson Adams briskly resented the landlord's brutality by 'sending him sprawling' on his own floor. His wife retaliated by seizing a pan of hog's-blood, which unluckily stood on the dresser, and discharging its contents in the good parson's face. Mrs. Slipshod entered the kitchen at this critical moment, and attacked the hostess with a skill developed by practice, tearing her cap, uprooting handfuls of hair, and delivering a succession of dexterous facers.
Parson Adams, when he required a trifling loan, ventured to wait on the swinish Parson Trulliber, whose wife introduced Adams in error, as 'a man come for some of his hogs.' Trulliber asserted that his animals were all pure fat, and upwards of twenty score apiece; he then dragged the parson into his stye, which was but two steps from his parlour-window, insisting that he should examine them before he would speak one word with him. Adams, whose natural complacence was beyond any artifice, was obliged to comply before he was suffered to explain himself, and laying hold of one of their tails, the wanton beast gave such a sudden spring that he threw poor Adams full length in the mire. Trulliber, instead of assisting him to get up, burst into laughter, and, entering the stye, said to Adams, with some contempt, 'Why, dost not know how to handle a hog?'
To those writers whose heroes are of their own creation, and whose brains are the chaos whence all their materials are collected—one may apply the saying of Balzac regarding Aristotle, that they are a second nature, for they have no communication with the first, by which authors of an inferior class, who cannot stand alone, are obliged to support themselves as with crutches; but these of whom I am now speaking seem to be possessed of those stilts which the excellent Voltaire tells us, in his letters, carry the genius far off, but with an irregular pace. Indeed, far out of the sight of the reader—
Beyond the realm of chaos and old night.
The pedlar, introduced in these adventures, while relating to Joseph Andrews and Parson Adams the early history of Fanny (then returned from Lady Booby's), proceeded thus: 'Though I am now contented with this humble way of getting my livelihood, I was formerly a gentleman; for so all those of my profession are called. In a word, I was drummer in an Irish regiment of foot. Whilst I was in this honourable station, I attended an officer of our regiment into England, a recruiting.' The pedlar then described meeting a gipsy-woman, who confided to him, on her death-bed, that she had kidnapped a beautiful female infant from a family named Andrews, and sold her to Squire Booby for three guineas. In Fanny he professed to recognise the stolen infant.