icated to my
mother the next day,--it has just given me an opportunity of entering
upon my uncle Toby's amours a fortnight before their existence.

I have an article of news to tell you, Mr. Shandy, quoth my mother,
which will surprise you greatly.--

Now my father was then holding one of his second beds of justice, and
was musing within himself about the hardships of matrimony, as my mother
broke silence.--

'--My brother Toby,' quoth she, 'is going to be married to Mrs. Wadman.'

--Then he will never, quoth my father, be able to lie diagonally in his
bed again as long as he lives.

It was a consuming vexation to my father, that my mother never asked the
meaning of a thing she did not understand.

--That she is not a woman of science, my father would say--is her
misfortune--but she might ask a question.--

My mother never did.--In short, she went out of the world at last
without knowing whether it turned round, or stood still.--My father had
officiously told her above a thousand times which way it was,--but she
always forgot.

For these reasons, a discourse seldom went on much further betwixt them,
than a proposition,--a reply, and a rejoinder; at the end of which,
it generally took breath for a few minutes (as in the affair of the
breeches), and then went on again.

If he marries, 'twill be the worse for us,--quoth my mother.

Not a cherry-stone, said my father,--he may as well batter away his
means upon that, as any thing else,

--To be sure, said my mother: so here ended the proposition--the
reply,--and the rejoinder, I told you of.

It will be some amusement to him, too,--said my father.

A very great one, answered my mother, if he should have children.--

--Lord have mercy upon me,--said my father to himself--....

Chapter 3.LXXXIII.

I am now beginning to get fairly into my work; and by the help of a
vegetable diet, with a few of the cold seeds, I make no doubt but I
shall be able to go on with my uncle Toby's story, and my own, in a
tolerable straight line. Now,

(four very squiggly lines across the page signed Inv.T.S and Scw.T.S)

These were the four lines I moved in through my first, second, third,
and fourth volumes (Alluding to the first edition.)--In the fifth volume
I have been very good,--the precise line I have described in it being
this:

(one very squiggly line across the page with loops marked
A,B,C,C,C,C,C,D)

By which it appears, that except at the curve, marked A. whe