CHAPTER SIXTEEN

My father, as any body may naturally imagine, came down
with my mother into the country, in but a pettish kind of a
humour. The first twenty or five-and-twenty miles he did
nothing in the world but fret and teaze himself, and indeed
my mother tool about the cursed expence, which he said
might every shilling of it have been saved;-then what
vexed him more than every thing else was, the provoking
time of the year,-which, as I told you, was towards the end
of September, when his wall-fruit, and green gages especially,
in which he was very curious, were just ready for pulling:
-,Had he been whistled up to London, upon a Tom Fool's
errand, in any other month of the whole year, he should not
have said three words about it.'
For the next two whole stages, no subject would go down,
but the heavy blow he had sustained from the loss of a son,
whom it seems he had fully reckoned upon in his mind, and
registered down in his pocket-book, as a second staff for his
old age, in case Bobby should fail him. The disappointment
of this, he said, was ten times more to a wise man than all
the money which the journey, &c., had cost him, put to-
gether,-rot the hundred and twenty pounds,-he did not
mind it a rush.
From Stilton, all the way to Grantham, nothing in the
whole affair provoked him so much as the condolences of
his friends, and the foolish figure they should both make
at church the first Sunday; f which, in the satirical
vehemence of his wit, now sharpened a little by vexation, he
would give so many humorous and provoking descriptions,-
and place his rib and self in so many tormenting lights and
attitudes in the face of the whole congregation;-that my
mother declared, these two stages were so truly tragi-comical,
that she did nothing but laugh and cry in a breath, from
one end to the other of them all the way.
From Grantham, till they had crosed the Trent, my father
was out of all kind of patience at the vile trick and imposi-
tion which he fancied my mother had put upon him in this
affair.-'Certainly,' he would say to himself, over and over
again, 'the woman could not be deceived herself;-if she
could what weakness l'-tormenting word I which led
his imagination a thorny dance, and, before all was over,
played the deuce and all with him;-for sure as ever the
word weakness was uttered, and struck full upon his brain,-
so sure it set him upon running divisions upon how many
kinds of weaknesses there were;-that there was such a thing
as weakness of the body,-as well as weakness of the mind,-
and then he would do nothing but syllogize within himself
for a stage or two together, How far the cause of all these
vexations might, or might not, have arisen out of himself.
In short, he had so many little subjects of disquietude
springing out of this one affair, all fretting successively in
his mind as they rose up in it, that my mother, whatever was
her journey up, had but an uneasy journey of it down.-In
a word, as she complained to my uncle Toby, he would have
tired out the patience of any flesh alive.

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