The pipes had better
be kept in a cupboard for a week or two, till in other and easier
respects Ernest should have proved his steadfastness. Then they might
steal out again little by little--and so they did.
Ernest now wrote home a letter couched in a vein different from his
ordinary ones. His letters were usually all common form and padding, for
as I have already explained, if he wrote about anything that really
interested him, his mother always wanted to know more and more about
it--every fresh answer being as the lopping off of a hydra's head and
giving birth to half a dozen or more new questions--but in the end it
came invariably to the same result, namely, that he ought to have done
something else, or ought not to go on doing as he proposed. Now,
however, there was a new departure, and for the thousandth time he
concluded that he was about to take a course of which his father and
mother would approve, and in which they would be interested, so that at
last he and they might get on more sympathetically than heretofore. He
therefore wrote a gushing impulsive letter, which afforded much amusement
to myself as I read it, but which is too long for reproduction.
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