When I sent off that first sketch I thought I had exhausted the
subject, but our editor wrote that he would like something more of
the same, so I sent him a marriage, and he took it, and then I
tried him with a funeral, and he took it, and really it began to
look as if we had him. Now my mother might have been discovered,
in answer to certain excited letters, flinging the bundle of
undarned socks from her lap, and 'going in for literature'; she was
racking her brains, by request, for memories I might convert into
articles, and they came to me in letters which she dictated to my
sisters. How well I could hear her sayings between the lines: 'But
the editor-man will never stand that, it's perfect blethers' - 'By
this post it must go, I tell you; we must take the editor when he's
hungry - we canna be blamed for it, can we? he prints them of his
free will, so the wite is his' - 'But I'm near terrified. - If
London folk reads them we're done for.' And I was sounded as to
the advisability of sending him a present of a lippie of
shortbread, which was to be her crafty way of getting round him.
By this time, though my mother and I were hundreds of miles apart,
you may picture us waving our hands to each other across country,
and shouting 'Hurrah!' You may also picture the editor in his
office thinking he was behaving like a shrewd man of business, and
unconscious that up in the north there was an elderly lady
chuckling so much at him that she could scarcely scrape the
potatoes.
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