When the misfortune of my Nose fell so heavily upon my father's head;--the reader remembers that he walked instantly up stairs, 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 this 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 any think 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 up stairs like the other--he walked composedly out with it to the fish-pond.
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 any think like it: there is something, Sir, in fish-ponds--but what it is, I leave to system-builders and fish-pond-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 Mahomet, nor any one of your noted lawgivers, ever gave order about them.