How can he get his father and his uncle off the stairs? Tristram asks the help of literary critics about how to proceed. And while he is on the subject of needing help, he points out that after writing for a year, he is in the middle of his fourth book and has just gotten to the point of telling about his first day of life (and not even that). He worries about the slow progress of the book: he has 364 days more to write about than when he started. How will it ever get finished? Obviously he will be writing all the rest of his life, and there is no hope of ever catching up: "I shall never overtake myself." "Heaven prosper the manufacturers of paper," he wishes because there are going to be many volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy!
Somehow his father and Uncle Toby have gotten down the stairs.
Because the child is apparently expiring, Susannah runs to Walter's room to ask what name he should be baptized with before he dies. He tells her "Trismegistus," but he doubts that she can remember the name: "Thou art a leaky vessel, Susannah, . . . canst thou carry Trismegistus in thy head, the length of the gallery without scattering?" She is off like a shot, with Walter trying to find his breeches so that he can make sure she gets the name right. She has a head start, however, and when she tells the curate that the name begins with "Tris-," he says that it must be "Tristram"; "Then 'tis Tristram-gistus," she insists. There is no such name, insists the curate (his name also happens to be Tristram). The child is baptized, "and so Tristram was I called, and Tristram shall I be to the day of my death." Walter arrives and asks the curate if Susannah remembered the name. The curate, "with a tone of intelligence," assures him that she did, and Walter goes slowly back to bed.
