-But alas! said the Corporal,-the Lieutenant's last day's march is over!--Then what is to become of his poor boy? cried my uncle Toby.

CHAPTER CLXIX.

THE STORY OF LE FEVRE CONTINUED.

Ir was to my uncle Toby's eternal honour,-though I tell it only for the sake of those who, when cooped 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.

--That kind Being, who is a friend to the friendless, shall recompense thee for this.

Thou hast left this matter short, said my uncle Toby to the Corporal, as he was putting him to bed,—and I will tell thee in what, Trim :-In the first place, when thou madest an offer of my services to Le Fevre,-as sickness and travelling are both expensive; and thou knowest, he was but a poor Lieutenant with a son to subsist as well as himself out of his pay,—that thou didst not make an offer to him of my purse; because, had he stood in need, thou knowest, Trim, he had been as welcome to it as myself. -Your honour knows, said the Corporal, I had no orders.True, quoth my uncle Toby,-thou didst very right, Trim, as a soldier,—but certainly very wrong as a man. In the second place, for which, indeed, thou hast the same excuse, continued my uncle Toby,--when thou offeredst him

whatever was in my house,-thou shouldst have offered him my house too. A sick brother officer should have the best quarters, Trim; and if we had him with us,we could tend and look to him.-Thou art an excellent nurse thyself, Trim;—and what with thy care of him, and the old woman's, and his boy's, and mine together, we might recruit him again at once, and set him upon his legs.

In a fortnight or three weeks, added my uncle Toby, smiling, he might march.He will never march, an' please your honour, in this world, said the Corporal.- -He will march,

said my uncle Toby, rising up from the side of the bed, with one shoe off.--An' please your honour, said the Corporal, he will never march but to his grave.-He shall march, cried my uncle Toby, marching the foot which had a shoe on, though without advancing an inch,—he shall march to his regiment. --He cannot stand it, said the Corporal.He shall be supported, said my uncle Toby. -He'll drop at last, said the Corporal, and what will become of his boy ?-He shall not drop, said my uncle Toby, firmly.--A-well-a-day!-do what we can for him, said Trim, maintaining his point,—the poor soul will die. He shall not die, by G-, cried my uncle Toby.

-The accusing spirit, which flew up to Heaven's chancery with the oath, blushed as he gave it in; and the recording angel, as he wrote it down, dropped a tear upon the word, and blotted it out for ever.

CHAPTER CLXX.

-My uncle Toby went to his bureau,-put his purse into his breeches pocket, and, having ordered the Corporal to go early in the morning for a physician, he went to bed, and fell asleep.

CHAPTER CLXXI.

THE STORY OF LE FEVRE CONTINUED.

THE sun looked bright the morning after, to every eye in the village but Le Fevre's and his afflicted son's; the hand of Death pressed heavy upon his eyelids ;-and hardly could the wheel at the cistern turn round its circle,-when my uncle Toby, who had rose up an hour before his wonted time, entered the Lieutenant's room, and without preface or apology, sat himself down upon the chair by the bedside, and, independently of all modes and customs, opened the curtain in the manner an old friend and brother officer would have done it, and asked him how he did,— how he had rested in the night,-what was his complaint,where was his pain, and what he could do to help him ;—and without giving him time to answer any one of these inquiries, went on, and told him of the little plan which he had been concerting with the Corporal the night before for him.

--You shall go home directly, Le Fevre, said my uncle Toby, to my house, and we'll send for a doctor to see what's the matter;—and we'll have an apothecary;—and the Corporal shall be your nurse;-and I'll be your servant, Le Fevre.

There was a frankness in my uncle Toby, not the effect of familiarity, but the cause of it,-which let you at once into his soul, and showed you the goodness of his nature. To this, there was something in his looks, and voice, and manner, superadded, which eternally beckoned to the unfortunate to come and take shelter under him; so that before my uncle Toby had half finished the kind offers he was making to the father, had the son insensibly pressed up close to his knees, and had taken hold of the breast of his coat, and was pulling it towards him.

-The blood and spirits of Le Fevre, which were waxing cold and slow within him, and were retreating to their last citadel, the heart,—rallied back, the film forsook his eyes for a moment; he looked up wishfully in my uncle Toby's face;—then cast a look upon his boy;-and that ligament, fine as it was, -was never broken.

Nature instantly ebbed again;-the film returned to its place;

-the pulse fluttered,-stopp'd,-went on,-throbb'd,-stopp'd again,―mov'd,—stopp'd.-Shall I go on ?—No.

CHAPTER CLXXII.

I AM SO impatient to return to my own story, that what remains of young Le Fevre's, that is, from this turn of his fortune to the time my uncle Toby recommended him for my preceptor, shall be told in a very few words in the next chapter.-All that is necessary to be added to this chapter, is as follows:

That my uncle Toby, with young Le Fevrei n his hand, attended the poor Lieutenant, as chief mourners, to his grave.

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 waterlandish knowledge in it;-but 'tis all tritical, and most tritically put together. This is but a flimsy kind of a composition. What was in my head when I made it?

-N. B. "The excellency of this text is, that it will suit any sermon:—and of this sermon,-that it will suit any text..

*

"For this sermon I shall be hanged, for I have stolen the greatest part of it. Doctor Paidagunes found me out. * Set a thief to catch a thief."

On the back of half a dozen I find written, So, so,--and no more :--and upon a couple Moderato; by which, as far as one may gather from Alfieri's Italian Dictionary,—but mostly from the authority of a piece of green whipcord, which seemed to have been the unravelling of Yorick's whip-lash, with which he has left us the two sermons marked Moderato, and the half dozen of so so tied fast together in one bundle by themselves,

-one may safely suppose he meant pretty nearly the same thing.

There is but one difficulty in the way of this conjecture, which is this, that the moderato's are five times better than the so so's; -show ten times more knowledge of the human heart;-have seventy times more wit and spirit in them;-(and, to rise properly in my climax)-discover a thousand times more genius; —and, to crown all, are infinitely more entertaining than those tied up with them :-for which reason, whenever Yorick's dramatic sermons are offered to the world, though I shall admit but one out of the whole number of the so so's, I shall, nevertheless, adventure to print the two moderato's without any sort of scruple.

What Yorick could mean by the words lentamente,—tenute, -grave,—and sometimes adagio,—as applied to theological compositions, and with which he has characterized some of these sermons, I dare not venture to guess.—I am more puzzled still, upon finding a l'octava alta! upon one;-Con strepito upon the back of another;-Scicilliana upon a third;-Alla capella upon a fourth ;-Con l'arco upon this;-Senza l'arco upon that.-All I know is, that they are musical terms, and have a meaning;-and as he was a musical man, I will make no doubt but that, by some quaint application of such metaphors to the compositions in hand, they impressed very distinct ideas of their several characters upon his fancy,-whatever they may do upon that of others.

Amongst these, there is that particular sermon which has unaccountably led me into this digression-The funeral sermon upon poor Le Fevre, wrote out very fairly, as if from a hasty copy. I take notice of it the more, because it seems to have been his favourite composition.-It is upon mortality; and is tied length-ways and cross-ways with a yarn-thrum, and then rolled up and twisted round with a half-sheet of dirty blue paper, which seems to have been once the cast cover of a general review, which to this day smells horribly of horse-drugs.-Whether these marks of humiliation were designed, I something doubt;-because at the end of the sermon (and not at the beginning of it)—very different from his way of treating the rest, he had wrote

BRAVO!