ot do. If he took money from them, he could not cut
them, and he wanted to cut them. I thought my godson would get on a
great deal better if he would only have the firmness to do as he
proposed, as regards breaking completely with his father and mother, and
said so. "Then don't you like them?" said he, with a look of surprise.

"Like them!" said I, "I think they're horrid."

"Oh, that's the kindest thing of all you have done for me," he exclaimed,
"I thought all--all middle-aged people liked my father and mother."

He had been about to call me old, but I was only fifty-seven, and was not
going to have this, so I made a face when I saw him hesitating, which
drove him into "middle-aged."

"If you like it," said I, "I will say all your family are horrid except
yourself and your aunt Alethea. The greater part of every family is
always odious; if there are one or two good ones in a very large family,
it is as much as can be expected."

"Thank you," he replied, gratefully, "I think I can now stand almost
anything. I will come and see you as soon as I come out of gaol. Good-
bye." For the warder had told us that the time allowed for our interview
was at an end.

CHAPTER LXVII

As soon as Ernest found that he had no money to look to upon leaving
prison he saw that his dreams about emigrating and farming must come to
an end, for he knew that he was incapable of working at the plough or
with the axe for long together himself. And now it seemed he should have
no money to pay any one else for doing so. It was this that resolved him
to part once and for all with his parents. If he had been going abroad
he could have kept up relations with them, for they would have been too
far off to interfere with him.

He knew his father and mother would object to being cut; they would wish
to appear kind and forgiving; they would also dislike having no further
power to plague him; but he knew also very well that so long as he and
they ran in harness together they would be always pulling one way and he
another. He wanted to drop the gentleman and go down into the ranks,
beginning on the lowest rung of the ladder, where no one would know of
his disgrace or mind it if he did know; his father and mother on the
other hand would wish him to clutch on to the fag-end of gentility at a
starvation salary and with no prospect of advancement. Ernest had seen
enough in Ashpit Place to know that a tailor, if he did not drink and
at