 Rome to France, - and from
France to England: -- So things come round. --
    By land carriage I can conceive no other way. --
    By water the sentiment might easily have come down the Ganges into the Sinus
Gangeticus, or Bay of Bengal, and so into the Indian Sea; and following the
course of trade, (the way from India by the Cape of Good Hope being then
unknown) might be carried with other drugs and spices up the Red Sea to Joddah,
the port of Mekka, or else to Tor or Sues, towns at the bottom of the gulf; and
from thence by karrawans to Coptos, but three days journey distant, so down the
Nile directly to Alexandria, where the SENTIMENT would be landed at the very
foot of the great staircase of the Alexandrian library, -- and from that
store-house it would be fetched. -- Bless me! what a trade was driven by the
learned in those days!
 

                                  Chap. XIII.

Now my father had a way, a little like that of Job's (in case there ever was
such a man -- if not, there's an end of the matter. --
    Though, by the bye, because your learned men find some difficulty in fixing
the precise æra in which so great a man lived; - whether, for instance, before
or after the patriarchs, etc. -- to vote, therefore, that he never lived at all,
is a little cruel, - 'tis not doing as they would be done by - happen that as it
may) -- My father, I say, had a way, when things went extremely wrong with him,
especially upon the first sally of his impatience, - of wondering why he was
begot, - wishing himself dead; - sometimes worse: -- And when the provocation
ran high, and grief touched his lips with more than ordinary powers, - Sir, you
scarce could have distinguished him from Socrates himself. -- Every word would
breathe the sentiments of a soul disdaining life, and careless about all its
issues; for which reason, though my mother was a woman of no deep reading, yet
the abstract of Socrates's oration, which my father was giving my uncle Toby,
was not altogether new to her. - She listened to it with composed intelligence,
and would have done so to the end of the chapter, had not my father plunged
(which he had no occasion to have done) into that part of the pleading where the
great philosopher reckons up his connections,
