gh of it--So
there's an end of that matter.

But before I begin my demonstration, let me only tell you, that the
chapter which I have torn out, and which otherwise you would all have
been reading just now, instead of this--was the description of my
father's, my uncle Toby's, Trim's, and Obadiah's setting out and
journeying to the visitation at....

We'll go in the coach, said my father--Prithee, have the arms been
altered, Obadiah?--It would have made my story much better to have begun
with telling you, that at the time my mother's arms were added to the
Shandy's, when the coach was re-painted upon my father's marriage, it
had so fallen out that the coach-painter, whether by performing all his
works with the left hand, like Turpilius the Roman, or Hans Holbein of
Basil--or whether 'twas more from the blunder of his head than hand--or
whether, lastly, it was from the sinister turn which every thing
relating to our family was apt to take--it so fell out, however, to
our reproach, that instead of the bend-dexter, which since Harry the
Eighth's reign was honestly our due--a bend-sinister, by some of these
fatalities, had been drawn quite across the field of the Shandy arms.
'Tis scarce credible that the mind of so wise a man as my father was,
could be so much incommoded with so small a matter. The word coach--let
it be whose it would--or coach-man, or coach-horse, or coach-hire, could
never be named in the family, but he constantly complained of carrying
this vile mark of illegitimacy upon the door of his own; he never once
was able to step into the coach, or out of it, without turning round to
take a view of the arms, and making a vow at the same time, that it
was the last time he would ever set his foot in it again, till the
bend-sinister was taken out--but like the affair of the hinge, it was
one of the many things which the Destinies had set down in their books
ever to be grumbled at (and in wiser families than ours)--but never to
be mended.

--Has the bend-sinister been brush'd out, I say? said my father.--There
has been nothing brush'd out, Sir, answered Obadiah, but the lining.
We'll go o'horseback, said my father, turning to Yorick--Of all things
in the world, except politicks, the clergy know the least of heraldry,
said Yorick.--No matter for that, cried my father--I should be sorry
to appear with a blot in my escutcheon before them.--Never mind the
bend-sinister, said my uncle Toby, putting on his tye-wig.--No,