Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 6).pdf/157

 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.