Black humor; Country life -- Fiction; Historical fiction; Scotland -- Fiction
"My truly grateful and devoted Henry Jekyl has adopted a tone, which
seems to be exalted without any occasion. Why, thou suspicious
monitor, have I not repeated a hundred times that I repent sincerely
of the foolish rencontre, and am determined to curb my temper, and
be on my guard in future--And what need you come upon me, with your
long lesson about execration, and punishment, and fratricide, and so
forth?--You deal with an argument as a boy does with the first hare
he shoots, which he never thinks dead till he has fired the second
barrel into her. What a fellow you would have been for a lawyer! how
long you would have held forth upon the plainest cause, until the
poor bothered judge was almost willing to decide against justice,
that he might be revenged on you. If I must repeat what I have said
twenty times, I tell you I have no thoughts of proceeding with this
fellow as I would with another. If my father's blood be in his
veins, it shall save the skin his mother gave him. And so come,
without more parade, either of stipulation or argument. Thou art,
indeed, a curious animal! One would think, to read your
communication, that you had yourself discovered the propriety of
acting as a negotiator, and the reasons which might, in the course
of such a treaty, be urged with advantage to induce this fellow to
leave the country--Why, this is the very course chalked out in my
last letter! You are bolder than the boldest gipsy, for you not only
steal my ideas, and disfigure them that they may pass for yours, but
you have the assurance to come a-begging with them to the door of
the original parent! No man like you for stealing other men's
inventions, and cooking them up in your own way. However, Harry,
bating a little self-conceit and assumption, thou art as honest a
fellow as ever man put faith in--clever, too, in your own style,
though not quite the genius you would fain pass for.--Come on thine
own terms, and come as speedily as thou canst. I do not reckon the
promise I made the less binding, that you very generously make no
allusion to it.
"Thine,
"ETHERINGTON.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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