It seemed hard on my good old friend to leave him without a reply. I
went to my writing-table, and read his letter again.
A letter which has nothing of the slightest importance in it, is
not always an easy letter to answer. Betteredge's present effort at
corresponding with me came within this category. Mr. Candy's assistant,
otherwise Ezra Jennings, had told his master that he had seen me; and
Mr. Candy, in his turn, wanted to see me and say something to me, when
I was next in the neighbourhood of Frizinghall. What was to be said in
answer to that, which would be worth the paper it was written on? I sat
idly drawing likenesses from memory of Mr. Candy's remarkable-looking
assistant, on the sheet of paper which I had vowed to dedicate
to Betteredge--until it suddenly occurred to me that here was the
irrepressible Ezra Jennings getting in my way again! I threw a dozen
portraits, at least, of the man with the piebald hair (the hair in every
case, remarkably like), into the waste-paper basket--and then and
there, wrote my answer to Betteredge. It was a perfectly commonplace
letter--but it had one excellent effect on me. The effort of writing
a few sentences, in plain English, completely cleared my mind of the
cloudy nonsense which had filled it since the previous day.
Pages:
666
667
668
669
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688
689
690