Walter Shandy and Parson Yorick discuss the possibility of renaming the child. The only way they can find out for certain is by discussing the matter thoroughly with the learned church lawyers and divines. They will do this at a dinner, and Toby will go along.
Tristram has torn a chapter from the book (Chapter 24), and he explains what was in it and why he did it. It contained a description of the journey on horseback of Walter, Toby, and Trim to the dinner.
The family coach has a coat of arms with a bend sinister (a bar indicating that the family has a bastard in its origins) — painted in by mistake but thus far uncorrected. Walter refuses to ride in a coach "carrying this vile mark of Illegitimacy upon the door," and he decides that they will travel by horse. The description of that journey, says Tristram, is "so much above the stile and manner of any thing else I have been able to paint in this book, that it could not have remained in it, without depreciating every other scene." Proportion is most important: "be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it." The risk of inserting the missing chapter is this: "A dwarf who brings a standard [yardstick] along with him to measure his own size . . . is a dwarf in more articles than one."
Kysarcius and Didius expostulate with Parson Yorick because the latter cut up his sermon — the one he had just delivered — and lighted his pipe with it (the dinner is over and they are sitting around the table eating roasted chestnuts and smoking). Yorick explains that because of the trouble he had in composing that sermon, he is taking his revenge on it. Phutatorius exclaims "Zounds!" at that point, and Uncle Toby thinks that the oath signifies that he is about to attack Yorick. He is wrong, however: a hot chestnut has fallen from the table into Phutatorius' open fly without his noticing it, and the heat has finally gotten through to him. He manages to draw it forth and throw it to the floor. When Yorick picks it up — he considers "a good chestnut worth stooping for" and that one "not a jot worse for the adventure" — Phutatorius is convinced that Yorick had somehow managed to drop the chestnut into his breeches. Thus, Yorick has another enemy.
