how my uncle Toby could mistake
the bridge--I fear I must give you an exact account of the road which
led to it;--or to drop my metaphor (for there is nothing more dishonest
in an historian than the use of one)--in order to conceive the
probability of this error in my uncle Toby aright, I must give you some
account of an adventure of Trim's, though much against my will, I say
much against my will, only because the story, in one sense, is certainly
out of its place here; for by right it should come in, either amongst
the anecdotes of my uncle Toby's amours with widow Wadman, in which
corporal Trim was no mean actor--or else in the middle of his and my
uncle Toby's campaigns on the bowling-green--for it will do very well in
either place;--but then if I reserve it for either of those parts of my
story--I ruin the story I'm upon;--and if I tell it here--I anticipate
matters, and ruin it there.

--What would your worship have me to do in this case?

--Tell it, Mr. Shandy, by all means.--You are a fool, Tristram, if you
do.

O ye powers! (for powers ye are, and great ones too)--which enable
mortal man to tell a story worth the hearing--that kindly shew him,
where he is to begin it--and where he is to end it--what he is to put
into it--and what he is to leave out--how much of it he is to cast into
a shade--and whereabouts he is to throw his light!--Ye, who preside over
this vast empire of biographical freebooters, and see how many scrapes
and plunges your subjects hourly fall into;--will you do one thing?

I beg and beseech you (in case you will do nothing better for us) that
wherever in any part of your dominions it so falls out, that three
several roads meet in one point, as they have done just here--that at
least you set up a guide-post in the centre of them, in mere charity, to
direct an uncertain devil which of the three he is to take.

Chapter 2.XVII.

Tho' the shock my uncle Toby received the year after the demolition of
Dunkirk, in his affair with widow Wadman, had fixed him in a resolution
never more to think of the sex--or of aught which belonged to it;--yet
corporal Trim had made no such bargain with himself. Indeed in my
uncle Toby's case there was a strange and unaccountable concurrence of
circumstances, which insensibly drew him in, to lay siege to that fair
and strong citadel.--In Trim's case there was a concurrence of nothing
in the world, but of him and Bridget in the kitchen;--though in truth,
the