Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 5).pdf/47

 —That's more than I know—replied my father.

mother was going very gingerly in the dark along the passage which led to the parlour, as my uncle Toby pronounced the word wife.—'Tis a shrill, penetrating sound of itself, and Obadiah had helped it by leaving the door a little a-jar, so that my mother heard enough of it, to imagine herself the subject of the conversation: so laying the edge of her finger across her two lips—holding her breath, and bending her head a little downwards, with a twist of her neck—(not towards the door, but from it, by which means her ear was brought to the chink)—she listened with all her powers:—the listening slave, with the Goddess of Silence at his back, could not have given a finer thought for an intaglio.