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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: the males,--the females had no character at all,--except, indeed, my great
aunt Dinah, who, about sixty years ago, was married and got with child by
the coachman, 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
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