And, besides, were you not another time enamoured of a voice--a mere voice, that mingled in the psalmody at the Old Greyfriars' Church--until you discovered the proprietor of that dulcet organ to be Miss Dolly MacIzzard, who is both 'back and breast', as our saying goes?
All these things considered, and contrasted with thy artful silence on the subject of this grace-saying Nereid of thine, I must beg thee to be more explicit upon that subject in thy next, unless thou wouldst have me form the conclusion that thou thinkest more of her than thou carest to talk of.
You will not expect much news from this quarter, as you know the monotony of my life, and are aware it must at present be devoted to uninterrupted study.

You have said a thousand times that I am only qualified to make my way by dint of plodding, and therefore plod I must.
My father seems to be more impatient of your absence than he was after your first departure.

He is sensible, I believe, that our solitary meals want the light which your gay humour was wont to throw over them, and feels melancholy as men do when the light of the sun is no longer upon the landscape.

If it is thus with him, thou mayst imagine it is much more so with me, and canst conceive how heartily I wish that thy frolic were ended, and thou once more our inmate .---- I resume my pen, after a few hours' interval, to say that an incident has occurred on which you will yourself be building a hundred castles in the air, and which even I, jealous as I am of such baseless fabrics, cannot but own affords ground for singular conjecture.
My father has of late taken me frequently along with him when he attends the courts, in his anxiety to see me properly initiated into the practical forms of business.

I own I feel something on his account and my own from this over-anxiety, which, I dare say, renders us both ridiculous.