II
"I wonder what's all that noise and running backwards and forwards for above stairs?" quoth my father, addressing himself after an hour and a half's silence to my Uncle Toby, who, you must know, was sitting on the opposite side of the fire, smoking his pipe all the time in mute contemplation of a new pair of black plush breeches which he had got on. "What can they be doing, brother?" quoth my father; "We can scarce hear ourselves talk."
"I think," replied my uncle Toby, taking his pipe from his mouth and striking the head of it two or three times upon the nail of his left thumb as he began his sentence; "I think," says he--but to enter rightly into my Uncle Toby's sentiments upon this matter, you must be made to enter just a little into his character.
III
The wound in my Uncle Toby's groin, which he received at the siege of Namur, rendering him unfit for the service, it was thought expedient he should return to England, in order, if possible, to be set to rights.
He was four years totally confined, partly to his bed and all of it to his room; and in the course of his cure, which was all that time in hand, suffered unspeakable misery.
My father at that time was just beginning business in London, and had taken a house, and as the truest friendship and cordiality subsisted between the two brothers, and as my father thought my Uncle Toby could nowhere be so well nursed and taken care of as in his own house, he assigned him the very best apartment in it. And what was a much more sincere mark of his affection still, he would never suffer a friend or acquaintance to step into the house, but he would take him by the hand, and lead him upstairs to see his brother Toby, and chat an hour by his bedside.
The history of a soldier's wound beguiles the pain of it--my uncle's visitors at least thought so, and they would frequently turn the discourse to that subject, and from that subject the discourse would generally roll on to the siege itself.
IV
When my Uncle Toby got his map of Namur to his mind he began immediately to apply himself, and with the utmost diligence, to the study of it. The more my Uncle Toby pored over the map, the more he took a liking to it.