Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 3).pdf/191

 thick and three-fold, one upon the neck of another,—a cow broke in (tomorrow morning) to my uncle Toby's fortifications, and eat up two ratios and half of dried grass, tearing up the sods with it, which faced his horn-work and covered way.—Trim insists upon being tried by a court-martial,—the cow to be shot,—Slop to be crucifix'd,—myself to be tristram'd, and at my very baptism made a martyr of;—poor unhappy devils that we all are!—I want swaddling,—but there is no time to be lost in exclamations.—I have left my father lying across his bed, and my uncle Toby in his old fringed chair, sitting beside him, and promised I would go back to them in half an hour, and five and thirty minutes are laps'd already.—Of all the perplexities a mortal author was ever seen in,—this certainly is the greatest,