to decide. The fact was this, That in the latter end of September 1717,
which was the year before I was born, my mother having carried my father up
to town much against the grain,--he peremptorily insisted upon the clause;-
-so that I was doom'd, by marriage-articles, to have my nose squeez'd as
flat to my face, as if the destinies had actually spun me without one.

How this event came about,--and what a train of vexatious disappointments,
in one stage or other of my life, have pursued me from the mere loss, or
rather compression, of this one single member,--shall be laid before the
reader all in due time.



Chapter 1.XVI.

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 too, 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 sustain'd from the loss of a son, whom it seems he had fully
reckon'd upon in his mind, and register'd down in his pocket-book, as a
second staff for his old age, in case Bobby should fail him. 'The