If, on the contrary, my uncle _Toby_ had not fully arrived at the period's end, --then the world stands indebted to the sudden snapping of my father's tobacco-pipe for one of the neatest examples of that ornamental figure in oratory, which Rhetoricians stile the _Aposiopesis_. 
 but if he had not fully arrived at its end, - then the world stands indebted to the sudden snapping of my father's tobacco-pipe for one of the neatest examples of that ornamental figure in oratory, the Aposiopesis. 