erally check us in
our careers in this world, to bear me witness, that I could never yet
get fairly to my uncle Toby's amours, till this very moment, that my
mother's curiosity, as she stated the affair,--or a different impulse
in her, as my father would have it--wished her to take a peep at them
through the key-hole.

'Call it, my dear, by its right name, quoth my father, and look through
the key-hole as long as you will.'

Nothing but the fermentation of that little subacid humour, which I
have often spoken of, in my father's habit, could have vented such an
insinuation--he was however frank and generous in his nature, and at all
times open to conviction; so that he had scarce got to the last word of
this ungracious retort, when his conscience smote him.

My mother was then conjugally swinging with her left arm twisted under
his right, in such wise, that the inside of her hand rested upon the
back of his--she raised her fingers, and let them fall--it could scarce
be call'd a tap; or if it was a tap--'twould have puzzled a casuist to
say, whether 'twas a tap of remonstrance, or a tap of confession:
my father, who was all sensibilities from head to foot, class'd it
right--Conscience redoubled her blow--he turn'd his face suddenly the
other way, and my mother supposing his body was about to turn with it in
order to move homewards, by a cross movement of her right leg, keeping
her left as its centre, brought herself so far in front, that as he
turned his head, he met her eye--Confusion again! he saw a thousand
reasons to wipe out the reproach, and as many to reproach himself--a
thin, blue, chill, pellucid chrystal with all its humours so at rest,
the least mote or speck of desire might have been seen, at the bottom of
it, had it existed--it did not--and how I happen to be so lewd myself,
particularly a little before the vernal and autumnal equinoxes--Heaven
above knows--My mother--madam--was so at no time, either by nature, by
institution, or example.

A temperate current of blood ran orderly through her veins in all months
of the year, and in all critical moments both of the day and night
alike; nor did she superinduce the least heat into her humours from the
manual effervescencies of devotional tracts, which having little or no
meaning in them, nature is oft-times obliged to find one--And as for
my father's example! 'twas so far from being either aiding or abetting
thereunto, that 'twas the whole business of his lif