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It was some time in the summer of that year in which Dendermond was taken by the Allies, which was about seven years after the time that my Uncle Toby and Trim had privately decamped from my father's house in town, in order to lay some of the finest sieges to some of the finest cities in Europe, when my Uncle Toby was one evening getting his supper, with Trim sitting behind him at a small sideboard, when the landlord of a little inn in the village came into the parlour with an empty phial in his hand, to beg a glass or two of sack: "'Tis for a poor gentleman, I think, of the Army," said the landlord, "who has been taken ill at my house four days ago, and has never held up his head since, or had a desire to taste anything, till just now, that he has a fancy for a glass of sack and a thin toast: 'I think, says he, 'it would comfort me. If I could neither beg, borrow nor buy such a thing," added the landlord, "I would almost steal it for the poor gentleman, he is so ill.
That the governor of Dendermond paid his obsequies all military honours, and that Yorick, not to be behind-hand paid him all ecclesiastic for he buried him in his chancel: And it appears likewise, he preached a funeral sermon over him I say it appears, for it was Yorick's custom, which I suppose a general one with those of his profession, on the first leaf of every sermon which he composed, to chronicle down the time, the place, and the occasion of its being preached: to this, he was ever wont to add some short comment or stricture upon the sermon itself, seldom, indeed, much to its credit: For instance, This sermon upon the Jewish dispensation I don't like it at all; Though I own there is a world of Water-Landish knowledge in it; but 'tis all tritical, and most tritically put together.
No longer Amberg and Rhinberg, and Limbourg, and Huy, and Bonn, in one year, and the prospect of Landen, and Trerebach, and Drusen, and Dendermond, the next, hurried on the blood: No longer did saps, and mines, and blinds, and gabions, and palisadoes, keep out this fair enemy of man's repose: No more could my uncle Toby, after passing the French lines, as he eat his egg at supper, from thence break into the heart of France, cross over the Oyes, and with all Picardie open behind him, march up to the gates of Paris, and fall asleep with nothing but ideas of glory: No more was he to dream, he had fixed the royal standard upon the tower of the Bastile, and awake with it streaming in his head.
It was to my uncle Toby's eternal honour, though I tell it only for the sake of those, who, when coop'd in betwixt a natural and a positive law, know not, for their souls, which way in the world to turn themselves That notwithstanding my uncle Toby was warmly engaged at that time in carrying on the siege of Dendermond, parallel with the allies, who pressed theirs on so vigorously, that they scarce allowed him time to get his dinner that nevertheless he gave up Dendermond, though he had already made a lodgment upon the counterscarp; and bent his whole thoughts towards the private distresses at the inn; and except that he ordered the garden gate to be bolted up, by which he might be said to have turned the siege of Dendermond into a blockade, he left Dendermond to itself to be relieved or not by the French king, as the French king thought good; and only considered how he himself should relieve the poor lieutenant and his son.
It answered prodigiously the next summer the town was a perfect Proteus It was Landen, and Trerebach, and Santvliet, and Drusen, and Hagenau, and then it was Ostend and Menin, and Aeth and Dendermond. Surely never did any Town act so many parts, since Sodom and Gomorrah, as my uncle Toby's town did.
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