left us behind in this weary journey." In the "autumn of this year, or
the spring of the next"--Sterne's memory failing in exactitude at the
very point where we should have expected it to be most precise--"my
father obtained permission of his colonel to fix me at school;" and
henceforth the boy's share in the family wanderings was at an end. But
his father had yet to be ordered from Carrickfergus to Londonderry,
where at last a permanent child, Catherine, was born; and thence to
Gibraltar, to take part in the Defence of that famous Rock, where the
much-enduring campaigner was run through the body in a duel, "about
a goose" (a thoroughly Shandian catastrophe); and thence to Jamaica,
where, "with a constitution impaired" by the sword-thrust earned in
his anserine quarrel, he was defeated in a more deadly duel with the
"country fever," and died. "His malady," writes his son, with a touch
of feeling struggling through his dislocated grammar, "took away his
senses first, and made a child of him; and then in a month or two
walking about continually without complaining, till the moment he sat
down in an arm-chair and breathed his last."

[Footnote 1: "It was in this parish," says Sterne, "that I had that
wonderful escape in falling through a mill race while the mill was
going, and being taken up unhurt; the story is incredible, but known
to all that part of Ireland, where hundreds of the common people
flocked to seeme." More incredible still does it seem that Thoresby
should relate the occurrence of an accident of precisely the same kind
to Sterne's great-grandfather, the Archbishop. "Playing near a mill,
he fell within a claw; there was but one board or bucket wanting in
the whole wheel, but a gracious Providence so ordered it that the void
place came down at that moment, else he had been crushed to death; but
was reserved to be a grand benefactor afterwards." (Thoresby, ii. 15.)
But what will probably strike the reader as more extraordinary even