 Chapter 51-52 of Tristram Shandy, Volume 1. Chapter 51. Whilst my Uncle Toby was whistling lillaboolero to my father, Dr. Slopp was stamping and cursing and damning at Obadiah at a most dreadful rate. It would have done you hard good and cured you, sir, for ever of the vile sin of swearing to have heard him, I am determined therefore to relate the whole affair to you. When Dr. Slopp's maid delivered the green bay's bag with her master's instruments in it to Obadiah, she very sensibly exhorted him to put his head and one arm through the strings and ride with it slung across his body. So undoing the bow-knot to lengthen the strings for him, without any more ado, she helped him on with it. However, as this, in some measure, unguarded the mouth of the bag, lest anything should bolt out in galloping bag. At the speed Obadiah threatened, they consulted to take it off again, and in the great care and caution of their hearts they had taken the two strings and tied them close, pursing up the mouth of the bag first, with half a dozen hard knots, each of which Obadiah, to make all safe, had twitched and drawn together with all the strength of his body. This answered all that Obadiah and the maid intended, but was no remedy against some evils which neither he or she foresaw. The instruments, it seems, as tight as the bag was tied above, had so much room to play in it towards the bottom, the shape of the bag being conical, that Obadiah could not make a trot of it, but with such a terrible jingle, what was it, tear-teared, forceps and squirt, as would have been enough, had Hyman been taken adjaunt that way, to have frightened him out of the country. But when Obadiah accelerated his motion, and from a plain trot, assayed, to prick his coach-horse into a full gallop, by heaven, sir, the jingle was incredible. As Obadiah had a wife and three children, the turpitude of fornication and the many other political ill-consequences of this jingling never once entered his brain. He had, however, his objection, which had come home to himself, and weighed with him, as it has oftentimes done with the greatest patriots. The poor fellow, sir, was not able to hear himself whistle. CHAPTER 52 As Obadiah loved wind music, preferably to all the instrumental music he carried with him, he very considerably set his imagination to work, to contrive and to invent, by what means he should put himself in the condition of enjoying it. In all distresses, except musical, where small chords are wanted, nothing is so apt to enter a man's head as his hat-band, the philosophy of this is so near the surface, I scorn to enter into it. As Obadiah's was a mixed case—Marxah's, I say, a mixed case, for it was obstetrical—scriptical—squartical—purpistical—and, as far as the coach-horse was concerned in it, cabalistical, and only partly musical. Obadiah made no scruple of availing himself of the first expedient which offered, so taking hold of the bag and instruments, and griping them hard together with one hand, and with the finger and thumb of the other, putting the end of the hat-band betwixt his teeth, and then slipping his hand down to the middle of it, he tied and cross-tied them all fast together from one end to the other, as you would call a trunk, with such a multiplicity of roundabouts and intricate cross-tands with a hard knot at every intersection or point where the strings met, that Dr. Slopp must have had three-fifths of jobs, at least to have unleashed them. I think in my conscience that had Nature been in one of her nimble moods, and in humour for such a contest, and she and Dr. Slopp both fairly started together, there is no man living which had seen the bag with all that Obadiah had done to it, and known likewise the great speed the Goddess can make when she sings proper, who would have had the least doubt remaining in his mind which of the two would have carried off the prize. My mother, madam, had been delivered sooner than the green bag infallibly, at least by twenty knots. Sport of small accidents, Tristram Shandy, that thou art, and ever will be. Had that trial been for thee, and it was fifty to one, but it had, thy affairs had not been so depressed, at least by the depression of thy nose, as they have been, nor had the fortunes of thy house and the occasions of making them, which have so often presented themselves in the course of thy life, to thee been so often, so vexatiously, so tamely, so irrevocably abandoned, as thou hast been forced to leave them. But it is over, all but the account of them, which cannot be given to the curious till I am got out into the world. End of chapters fifty-one to fifty-two. And end of the first volume of the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentlemen, by Lawrence Stern.