Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 7).pdf/126

 others speak by it, and equally make me silent: nay my dog and my cat, though I value them both(and for my dog he would speak if he could)—yet some how or other, they neither of them possess the talents for conversation—I can make nothing of a discourse with them, beyond the proposition, the reply, and rejoinder, which terminated my father's and my mother's conversations, in his beds of justiceand those utter'd—there's an end of the dialogue

—But with an ass, I can commune for ever.

Come Honesty! said I,—seeing it was impracticable to pass betwixt him and the gate—art thou for coming in, or going out?