Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 3).pdf/199



a pity, cried my father one winter's night, after a three hours painful translation of Slawkenbergius,—'tis a pity, cried my father, putting my mother's thread-paper into the book for a mark, as he spoke—that truth, brother Toby, should shut herself up in such impregnable fastnessess, and be so obstinate as not to surrender herself sometimes up upon the closest siege.—

Now it happened then, as indeed it had often done before, that my uncle Toby's fancy, during the time of my father's explanation of Prignitz to him,—having nothing to stay it there, had taken a short flight to the bowling-green;—his body might as well have taken a turn there