Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 1).pdf/151

 man, for which my father, according to his hypothesis of Christian names, would often say, She might thank her godfathers and godmothers.

It will seem strange,—and I would as soon think of dropping a riddle in the reader's way, which is not my interest to do, as set him upon guessing how it could come to pass, that an event of this kind, so many years after it had happened, should be reserved for the interruption of the peace and unity, which otherwise so cordially subsisted, between my father and my uncle Toby. One would have thought, that the whole force of the misfortune should have spent and wasted itself in the family at first,—as is generally the case:—But nothing ever wrought with our family after the ordinary way. Possibly at the