In spite of his clearly stated intention to go on to the story of Uncle Toby's amours, Tristram seriously doubts that he will be able to avoid "bastardly" digressions. He will, however, try his best.
Beginning with the half-sentence "It is with LOVE as with CUCKOLDOM — ," Tristram interrupts to talk about his way of beginning a book. He is confident that his way of doing it is the best (further, "it is the most religious"): "I begin with writing the first sentence — and trusting to Almighty God for the second."
After a little digression on his "great aunt Dinah's old black velvet mask" — because the Shandy women have shown their faces in public, they have attracted fewer distinguished husbands — Tristram finishes his sentence, "It is with LOVE as with CUCKOLDOM — ": "the suffering party is . . . the last in the house who knows any thing about the matter." Hearing about if finally from the servants, Uncle Toby had "to look into the affair."
Water-drinkers supposedly have "some tender nymph breaking her heart in secret for them," as a rule. Tristram doesn't really understand why "a rill of cold water dribbling through my inward parts, should light up a torch in my Jenny's — ," but it does. Unfortunately, Uncle Toby is not a water-drinker: "He drank it neither pure nor mix'd, or any how, or any where" if he could avoid it. Tristram's theory doesn't seem to work, and he himself is at a loss to explain what he is doing in this chapter: "One would think I took a pleasure in running into difficulties of this kind, merely to make fresh experiments of getting out of em." He enumerates his other troubles, among them this: "and is it but two months ago, that in a fit of laughter, on seeing a cardinal make water like a . . . [choir boy] (with both hands)," he broke a vessel in his lungs and lost two quarts of blood. The doctors told him that if he had lost as much more, "it would have amounted to a gallon."
"But for heaven's sake, . . . let us take the story straight before us," Tristram says, as if we somehow have been leading him away from it.
