’Tis a pity, Trim, said my uncle Toby, resting with his hand upon the corporal’s shoulder, as they both stood surveying their works,⁠—that we have not a couple of field-pieces to mount in the gorge of that new redoubt;⁠⸺’twould secure the lines all along there, and make the attack on that side quite complete:⁠⸺⁠get me a couple cast, Trim.

Your honour shall have them, replied Trim, before tomorrow morning.

It was the joy of Trim’s heart,⁠—nor was his fertile head ever at a loss for expedients in doing it, to supply my uncle Toby in his campaigns, with whatever his fancy called for; had it been his last crown, he would have sat down and hammered it into a paderero, to have prevented a single wish in his Master. The corporal had already,⁠—what with cutting off the ends of my uncle Toby’s spouts⁠—hacking and chiseling up the sides of his leaden gutters,⁠—melting down his pewter shaving-bason,⁠—and going at last, like Lewis the Fourteenth, on to the top of the church, for spare ends, etc.⁠⸺⁠he had that very campaign brought no less than eight new battering cannons, besides three demi-culverins, into the field; my uncle Toby’s demand for two more pieces for the redoubt, had set the corporal at work again; and no better resource offering, he had taken the two leaden weights from the nursery window: and as the sash pullies, when the lead was gone, were of no kind of use, he had taken them away also, to make a couple of wheels for one of their carriages.

He had dismantled every sash-window in my uncle Toby’s house long before, in the very same way,⁠—though not always in the same order; for sometimes the pullies have been wanted, and not the lead,⁠—so then he began with the pullies,⁠—and the pullies being picked out, then the lead became useless,⁠—and so the lead went to pot too.

⸺⁠A great moral might be picked handsomely out of this, but I have not time⁠—’tis enough to say, wherever the demolition began, ’twas equally fatal to the sash window.