When the misfortune of my Nose fell so heavily upon my father’s head;⁠—the reader remembers that he walked instantly upstairs, and cast himself down upon his bed; and from hence, unless he has a great insight into human nature, he will be apt to expect a rotation of the same ascending and descending movements from him, upon his misfortune of my Name;⁠⸺⁠no.

The different weight, dear Sir⁠⸺⁠nay even the different package of two vexations of the same weight⁠⸺⁠makes a very wide difference in our manner of bearing and getting through with them.⁠⸺⁠It is not half an hour ago, when (in the great hurry and precipitation of a poor devil’s writing for daily bread) I threw a fair sheet, which I had just finished, and carefully wrote out, slap into the fire, instead of the foul one.

Instantly I snatch’d off my wig, and threw it perpendicularly, with all imaginable violence, up to the top of the room⁠—indeed I caught it as it fell⁠⸺⁠but there was an end of the matter; nor do I think anything else in Nature would have given such immediate ease: She, dear Goddess, by an instantaneous impulse, in all provoking cases, determines us to a sally of this or that member⁠—or else she thrusts us into this or that place or posture of body, we know not why⁠⸺⁠But mark, madam, we live amongst riddles and mysteries⁠⸺⁠the most obvious things, which come in our way, have dark sides, which the quickest sight cannot penetrate into; and even the clearest and most exalted understandings amongst us find ourselves puzzled and at a loss in almost every cranny of nature’s works: so that this, like a thousand other things, falls out for us in a way, which tho’ we cannot reason upon it⁠—yet we find the good of it, may it please your reverences and your worships⁠⸺⁠and that’s enough for us.

Now, my father could not lie down with this affliction for his life⁠⸺⁠nor could he carry it upstairs like the other⁠—he walked composedly out with it to the fishpond.

Had my father leaned his head upon his hand, and reasoned an hour which way to have gone⁠⸻reason, with all her force, could not have directed him to anything like it: there is something, Sir, in fishponds⁠⸺⁠but what it is, I leave to system-builders and fishpond-diggers betwixt ’em to find out⁠—but there is something, under the first disorderly transport of the humours, so unaccountably becalming in an orderly and a sober walk towards one of them, that I have often wondered that neither Pythagoras, nor Plato, nor Solon, nor Lycurgus, nor Muhammad, nor any one of your noted lawgivers, ever gave order about them.