Oh! let woman alone for this. Mrs. Wadman had scarce opened the wicker-gate, when her genius sported with the change of circumstances.
She formed a new attack in a moment.
"I am half distracted, Captain Shandy," said Mrs. Wadman, holding up her cambric handkerchief to her left eye, as she approached the door of my uncle Toby's sentry-box; "a mote, or sand, or something I know not what, has got into this eye of mine; do look into it; it is not in the white."
In saying which, Mrs. Wadman edged herself close in beside my uncle Toby, and squeezing herself down upon the corner of his bench, she gave him an opportunity of doing it without rising up. "Do look into it," said she.
Honest soul! thou didst look into it with as much innocency of heart as ever child looked into a raree show-box; and 'twere as much a sin to have hurt thee.
If a man will be peeping of his own accord into things of that nature, I've nothing to say to it.
My uncle Toby never did: and I will answer for him, that he would have sat quietly upon a sofa from June to January (which, you know, takes in both the hot and cold months) with an eye as fine as the Thracian Rhodope's beside him, without being able to tell whether it was a black or a blue one.
The difficulty was, to get my uncle Toby to look at one at all.
'Tis surmounted. And—
I see him yonder, with his pipe pendulous in his hand, and the ashes falling out of it, looking and looking, then rubbing his eyes, and looking again, with twice the good nature that ever Galileo looked for a spot in the sun.