Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 7).pdf/43



I in a condition to stipulate with death, as I am this moment with my apothecary, how and where I will take his glister—I should certainly declare against submitting to it before my friends; and therefore, I never seriously think upon the mode and manner of this great catastrophe, which generally takes up and torments my thoughts as much as the catastrophe itself, but I constantly draw the curtain across it with this wish, that the Disposer of all things may so order it, that it happen not to me in my own house—but rather in some decent inn—at home, I know it,—the concern of my friends, and the last services of wiping my brows and smoothing my