him for a nightcap when he went to bed, and for an umbrella in rainy
weather. He would lap a piece of it about a sore toe; or, when he
had fits, burn two inches under his nose; or, if anything lay heavy
on his stomach, scrape off and swallow as much of the powder as
would lie on a silver penny--they were all infallible remedies.
With analogy to these refinements, his common talk and conversation
ran wholly in the praise of his Will, and he circumscribed the
utmost of his eloquence within that compass, not daring to let slip
a syllable without authority from thence. Once at a strange house
he was suddenly taken short upon an urgent juncture, whereon it may
not be allowed too particularly to dilate, and being not able to
call to mind, with that suddenness the occasion required, an
authentic phrase for demanding the way to the back, he chose rather,
as the more prudent course, to incur the penalty in such cases
usually annexed; neither was it possible for the united rhetoric of
mankind to prevail with him to make himself clean again, because,
having consulted the will upon this emergency, he met with a passage
near the bottom (whether foisted in by the transcriber is not known)
which seemed to forbid it {145a}.

He made it a part of his religion never to say grace to his meat,
nor could all the world persuade him, as the common phrase is, to
eat his victuals like a Christian {145b}.

He bore a strange kind of appetite to snap-dragon and to the livid
snuffs of a burning candle {146a}, which he would catch and swallow
with an agility wonderful to conceive; and by this procedure
maintained a perpetual flame in his belly, which issuing in a
glowing steam from both his eyes, as well as his nostrils and his
mouth, made his head appear in a dark night like the skull of an ass