Explore "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" by Laurence Sterne on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
As the point was that night agreed, or rather determined, that my mother should lye-in of me in the country, she took her measures accordingly; for which purpose, when she was three days, or thereabouts, gone with child, she began to cast her eyes upon the midwife, whom you have so often heard me mention; and before the week was well got round, as the famous Dr. Manningham was not to be had, she had come to a final determination in her mind, -- -- -notwithstanding there was a scientific operator within so near a call as eight miles of us, and who, moreover, had expressly wrote a five shillings book upon the subject of midwifery, in which he had exposed, not only the blunders of the sisterhood itself, -- -- -but had likewise superadded many curious improvements for the quicker extraction of the fœtus in cross births, and some other cases of danger, which belay us in getting into the world; notwithstanding all this, my mother, I say, was absolutely determined to trust her life, and mine with it, into no soul's hand but this old woman's only.
-- Now this I like; -- when we cannot get at the very thing we wish -- -- -never to take up with the next best in degree to it: -- no; that's pitiful beyond description; -- it is no more than a week from this very day, in which I am now writing this book for the edification of the world; -- which is March 9, 1759, -- -- -that my dear, dear Jenny, observing I looked a little grave, as she stood cheapening a silk of five-and-twenty shillings a yard, -- told the mercer, she was sorry she had given him so much trouble; -- and immediately went and bought herself a yard-wide stuff of tenpence a yard.