seven miles from Wicklow, who, being a relative of my mother’s, invited us to his parsonage at Animo.[1]” From thence, again, “we followed the regiment to Dublin,” where again “we lay in the barracks a year.”  In 1722 the regiment was ordered to Carrickfergus.  “We all decamped, but got no further than Drogheda; thence ordered to Mullingar, forty miles west, where, by Providence, we stumbled upon a kind relation, a collateral descendant from Archbishop Sterne, who took us all to his castle, and kindly entertained us for a year.”  Thence, by “a most rueful journey,” to Carrickfergus, where “we arrived in six or seven days.”  Here, at the age of three, little Devijeher obtained a happy release from his name; and “another child, Susan, was sent to fill his place, who also left us behind in this weary journey.”  In the “autumn of this year, or the spring of the next”—­Sterne’s memory failing in exactitude at the very point where we should have expected it to be most precise—­“my father obtained permission of his colonel to fix me at school;” and henceforth the boy’s share in the family wanderings was at an end.  But his father had yet to be ordered from Carrickfergus to Londonderry, where at last a permanent child, Catherine, was born; and thence to Gibraltar, to take part in the Defence of that famous Rock, where the much-enduring campaigner was run through the body in a duel, “about a goose” (a thoroughly Shandian catastrophe); and thence to Jamaica, where, “with a constitution impaired” by the sword-thrust earned in his anserine quarrel, he was defeated in a more deadly duel with the “country fever,” and died.  “His malady,” writes his son, with a touch of feeling struggling through his dislocated grammar, “took away his senses first, and made a child of him; and then in a month or two walking about continually without complaining, till the moment he sat down in an arm-chair and breathed his last.”

[Footnote 1:  “It was in this parish,” says Sterne, “that I had that wonderful escape in falling through a mill race while the mill was going, and being taken up unhurt; the story is incredible, but known to all that part of Ireland, where hundreds of the common people flocked to seeme.”  More incredible still does it seem that Thoresby should relate the occurrence of an accident of precisely the same kind to Sterne’s great-grandfather, the Archbishop.  “Playing near a mill, he fell within a claw; there was but one board or bucket wanting in the whole wheel, but a gracious Providence so ordered it that the void place came down at that moment, else he had been crushed to death; but was reserved to be a grand benefactor afterwards.” (Thoresby, ii. 15.) But what will probably strike the reader as more extraordinary even than this coincidence is that Sterne should have been either unaware of it, or should have omitted mention of it in the above passage.]