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 the occasion is lost,—I must tell it now in my own.

was some time in the summer of that year in which Dendermond was taken by the allies,—which was about seven years before my father came into the country,—and about as many, after the time, that my uncle Toby and Trim had privately decamped from my father's house in town, in order to lay some of the finest sieges to some of the finest fortified cities in Europe—when my uncle Toby was one evening getting his supper, with Trim sitting behind him at a small sideboard,—I say, sitting—for