CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE wound in my uncle
Toby's groin, which he received
at the siege of Namur, rendering him unfit for the service,
it was thought expedient he should return to England, in
order, if possible, to be set to rights.
He was four years totally confined,-part of it to his bed,
and all of it to his room; and in the course of his cure, which
was all that time in hand, suffered unspeakable miseries,-
owing to a succession of exfoliations from the os pubis, and
the outward edge of that part of the coxendix called the os
illium,-both which bones were dismally crushed, as much
by the irregularity of the stone, which I told you was broke
off the parapet,-as by its size,-(though it was pretty large)
which inclined the surgeon all along to think, that the great
injury which it had done my uncle Toby's groin, was more
owing to the gravity of the stone itself, than to the projectile
force of it,-which he would often tell him was a great
happiness.
My father at that time
was just beginning business in
London, and had taken a house;-and as the truest friend-
ship and cordiality subsisted between the two brothers,-
and that my father thought
my uncle Toby could no where
be so well nursed and taken care of as in his own house'
he assigned him the very best apartment in it.-And what
was a much more sincere mark of his affection still, he would
never suffer a friend or an acquaintance to step into the
house on any occasion, but he would take him by the hand,
and lead him upstairs to see his brother Toby, and chat an
hour by his bedside.
The history of a soldier's wound beguiles the pain of it;-
my uncle's visitors at least thought so, and in their daily
calls upon him, from the courtesy arising out of that belief,
they would frequently turn the discourse to that subject,-
and ,- from that subject the discourse would generally roll on
to the siege itself.
These conversations were infinitely kind; and my uncle
Toby received great relief
from them, and would have re-
ceived much more, but that they brought him into some
unforeseen perplexities, which, for three months together,
retarded his cure greatly; and if he had not hit upon an
expedient to extricate himself out of them, I verily believe
they would have laid him in his grave.
'What these perplexities of my uncle Toby were,-'tis im-
possible for you to guess;-if you could,-l should blush;
not as a relation,-not as a man,-nor even as a woman,-
but I should blush as an author; inasmuch as I set no small
store by myself upon this very account, that my reader has
never yet been able to guess at any thing. And in this, Sir,
I am of so nice and singular a humour, that if I thought you
was able to form the least judgment or probable conjecture
to yourself, of what was to come in the next page-I would
tear it out of my book.