My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both

names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister – Mrs. Joe Gargery,
who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either
of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they
were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave
me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of
the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was
freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a
neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine – who gave up
trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle – I am indebted for a belief I religiously
entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had
never taken them out in this state of existence.

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first
most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a
memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place
overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana
wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger,
infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the
churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the
marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which
the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and
beginning to cry, was Pip.

“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the
church porch. “Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!”

A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and
with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and
lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and
glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

“O! Don’t cut my throat, sir,” I pleaded in terror. “Pray don’t do it, sir.”

“Tell us your name!” said the man. “Quick!”

“Pip, sir.”
“Once more,” said the man, staring at me. “Give it mouth!”

“Pip. Pip, sir.”

“Show us where you live,” said the man. “Pint out the place!”

I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat in-shore among the alder-trees and pollards, a mile or more
from the church.

The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down, and emptied my pockets. There was
nothing in them but a piece of bread. When the church came to itself – for he was so sudden and strong
that he made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my feet – when the church
came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high tombstone, trembling, while he ate the bread ravenously.

In the Churchyard

“You young dog,” said the man, licking his lips, “what fat cheeks you ha’ got.”

I believe they were fat, though I was at that time undersized for my years, and not strong.

“Darn me if I couldn’t eat em,” said the man, with a threatening shake of his head, “and if I han’t half a
mind to’t!”

I earnestly expressed my hope that he wouldn’t, and held tighter to the tombstone on which he had put
me; partly, to keep myself upon it; partly, to keep myself from crying.

“Now lookee here!” said the man. “Where’s your mother?”

“There, sir!” said I.

He started, made a short run, and stopped and looked over his shoulder.

“There, sir!” I timidly explained. “Also Georgiana. That’s my mother.”

“Oh!” said he, coming back. “And is that your father alonger your mother?”

“Yes, sir,” said I; “him too; late of this parish.”

“Ha!” he muttered then, considering. “Who d’ye live with – supposin’ you’re kindly let to live, which I han’t
made up my mind about?”

“My sister, sir – Mrs. Joe Gargery – wife of Joe Gargery, the blacksmith, sir.”

“Blacksmith, eh?” said he. And looked down at his leg.

After darkly looking at his leg and me several times, he came closer to my tombstone, took me by both
arms, and tilted me back as far as he could hold me; so that his eyes looked most powerfully down into
mine, and mine looked most helplessly up into his.

“Now lookee here,” he said, “the question being whether you’re to be let to live. You know what a file is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you know what wittles is?”

“Yes, sir.”

After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to give me a greater sense of helplessness and
danger.

“You get me a file.” He tilted me again. “And you get me wittles.” He tilted me again. “You bring ’em both
to me.” He tilted me again. “Or I’ll have your heart and liver out.” He tilted me again.

I was dreadfully frightened, and so giddy that I clung to him with both hands, and said, “If you would kindly
please to let me keep upright, sir, perhaps I shouldn’t be sick, and perhaps I could attend more.”
He gave me a most tremendous dip and roll, so that the church jumped over its own weather-cock. Then,
he held me by the arms, in an upright position on the top of the stone, and went on in these fearful terms:

“You bring me, to-morrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You bring the lot to me, at that old
Battery over yonder. You do it, and you never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your
having seen such a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to live. You fail, or you go
from my words in any partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart and your liver shall be tore out,
roasted and ate. Now, I ain’t alone, as you may think I am. There’s a young man hid with me, in comparison
with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret
way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It is in wain for a boy to
attempt to hide himself from that young man. A boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck
himself up, may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but that young
man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him open. I am a-keeping that young man from
harming of you at the present moment, with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young man off
of your inside. Now, what do you say?”

I said that I would get him the file, and I would get him what broken bits of food I could, and I would come
to him at the Battery, early in the morning.

“Say Lord strike you dead if you don’t!” said the man.

I said so, and he took me down.

“Now,” he pursued, “you remember what you’ve undertook, and you remember that young man, and you
get home!”

“Goo-good night, sir,” I faltered.

“Much of that!” said he, glancing about him over the cold wet flat. “I wish I was a frog. Or a eel!”

At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his arms – clasping himself, as if to hold himself
together – and limped towards the low church wall. As I saw him go, picking his way among the nettles, and
among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the
hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull
him in.

When he came to the low church wall, he got over it, like a man whose legs were numbed and stiff, and
then turned round to look for me. When I saw him turning, I set my face towards home, and made the best
use of my legs. But presently I looked over my shoulder, and saw him going on again towards the river, still
hugging himself in both arms, and picking his way with his sore feet among the great stones dropped into
the marshes here and there, for stepping-places when the rains were heavy, or the tide was in.

The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped to look after him; and the river was
just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry
red lines and dense black lines intermixed. On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two
black things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon by which
the sailors steered – like an unhooped cask upon a pole – an ugly thing when you were near it; the other a
gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on towards this
latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again. It
gave me a terrible turn when I thought so; and as I saw the cattle lifting their heads to gaze after him, I
wondered whether they thought so too. I looked all round for the horrible young man, and could see no
signs of him. But, now I was frightened again, and ran home without stopping.

Chapter 2

My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great
reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time
to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to
be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I
were both brought up by hand.

She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general impression that she must have made Joe
Gargery marry her by hand. Joe was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth face,
and with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed to have somehow got mixed with their own
whites. He was a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow – a sort of Hercules
in strength, and also in weakness.

My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a prevailing redness of skin that I sometimes used to
wonder whether it was possible she washed herself with a nutmeg-grater instead of soap. She was tall and
bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her figure behind with two loops, and having a
square impregnable bib in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful merit in
herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore this apron so much. Though I really see no reason
why she should have worn it at all: or why, if she did wear it at all, she should not have taken it off, every
day of her life.

Joe’s forge adjoined our house, which was a wooden house, as many of the dwellings in our country were –
most of them, at that time. When I ran home from the churchyard, the forge was shut up, and Joe was
sitting alone in the kitchen. Joe and I being fellow-sufferers, and having confidences as such, Joe imparted a
confidence to me, the moment I raised the latch of the door and peeped in at him opposite to it, sitting in
the chimney corner.

“Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you, Pip. And she’s out now, making it a baker’s dozen.”

“Is she?”

“Yes, Pip,” said Joe; “and what’s worse, she’s got Tickler with her.”

At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only button on my waistcoat round and round, and looked in great
depression at the fire. Tickler was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled
frame.

“She sot down,” said Joe, “and she got up, and she made a grab at Tickler, and she Ram-paged out. That’s
what she did,” said Joe, slowly clearing the fire between the lower bars with the poker, and looking at it:
“she Ram-paged out, Pip.”

“Has she been gone long, Joe?” I always treated him as a larger species of child, and as no more than my
equal.

“Well,” said Joe, glancing up at the Dutch clock, “she’s been on the Ram-page, this last spell, about five
minutes, Pip. She’s a- coming! Get behind the door, old chap, and have the jack-towel betwixt you.”

I took the advice. My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing the door wide open, and finding an obstruction behind it,
immediately divined the cause, and applied Tickler to its further investigation. She concluded by throwing
me – I often served as a connubial missile – at Joe, who, glad to get hold of me on any terms, passed me on
into the chimney and quietly fenced me up there with his great leg.

“Where have you been, you young monkey?” said Mrs. Joe, stamping her foot. “Tell me directly what
you’ve been doing to wear me away with fret and fright and worrit, or I’d have you out of that corner if you
was fifty Pips, and he was five hundred Gargerys.”

“I have only been to the churchyard,” said I, from my stool, crying and rubbing myself.

“Churchyard!” repeated my sister. “If it warn’t for me you’d have been to the churchyard long ago, and
stayed there. Who brought you up by hand?”
“You did,” said I.

“And why did I do it, I should like to know?” exclaimed my sister.

I whimpered, “I don’t know.”

“I don’t!” said my sister. “I’d never do it again! I know that. I may truly say I’ve never had this apron of mine
off, since born you were. It’s bad enough to be a blacksmith’s wife (and him a Gargery) without being your
mother.”

My thoughts strayed from that question as I looked disconsolately at the fire. For, the fugitive out on the
marshes with the ironed leg, the mysterious young man, the file, the food, and the dreadful pledge I was
under to commit a larceny on those sheltering premises, rose before me in the avenging coals.

“Hah!” said Mrs. Joe, restoring Tickler to his station. “Churchyard, indeed! You may well say churchyard,
you two.” One of us, by-the-bye, had not said it at all. “You’ll drive me to the churchyard betwixt you, one
of these days, and oh, a pr-r-recious pair you’d be without me!”

As she applied herself to set the tea-things, Joe peeped down at me over his leg, as if he were mentally
casting me and himself up, and calculating what kind of pair we practically should make, under the grievous
circumstances foreshadowed. After that, he sat feeling his right-side flaxen curls and whisker, and following
Mrs. Joe about with his blue eyes, as his manner always was at squally times.

My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread-and-butter for us, that never varied. First, with her left
hand she jammed the loaf hard and fast against her bib – where it sometimes got a pin into it, and
sometimes a needle, which we afterwards got into our mouths. Then she took some butter (not too much)
on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in an apothecary kind of way, as if she were making a plaister – using
both sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity, and trimming and moulding the butter off round the crust.
Then, she gave the knife a final smart wipe on the edge of the plaister, and then sawed a very thick round
off the loaf: which she finally, before separating from the loaf, hewed into two halves, of which Joe got one,
and I the other.

On the present occasion, though I was hungry, I dared not eat my slice. I felt that I must have something in
reserve for my dreadful acquaintance, and his ally the still more dreadful young man. I knew Mrs. Joe’s
housekeeping to be of the strictest kind, and that my larcenous researches might find nothing available in
the safe. Therefore I resolved to put my hunk of bread-and-butter down the leg of my trousers.
The effort of resolution necessary to the achievement of this purpose, I found to be quite awful. It was as if
I had to make up my mind to leap from the top of a high house, or plunge into a great depth of water. And
it was made the more difficult by the unconscious Joe. In our already-mentioned freemasonry as fellow-
sufferers, and in his good-natured companionship with me, it was our evening habit to compare the way we
bit through our slices, by silently holding them up to each other’s admiration now and then – which
stimulated us to new exertions. To-night, Joe several times invited me, by the display of his fast-diminishing
slice, to enter upon our usual friendly competition; but he found me, each time, with my yellow mug of tea
on one knee, and my untouched bread-and-butter on the other. At last, I desperately considered that the
thing I contemplated must be done, and that it had best be done in the least improbable manner consistent
with the circumstances. I took advantage of a moment when Joe had just looked at me, and got my bread-
and-butter down my leg.

Joe was evidently made uncomfortable by what he supposed to be my loss of appetite, and took a
thoughtful bite out of his slice, which he didn’t seem to enjoy. He turned it about in his mouth much longer
than usual, pondering over it a good deal, and after all gulped it down like a pill. He was about to take
another bite, and had just got his head on one side for a good purchase on it, when his eye fell on me, and
he saw that my bread-and-butter was gone.

The wonder and consternation with which Joe stopped on the threshold of his bite and stared at me, were
too evident to escape my sister’s observation.

“What’s the matter now?” said she, smartly, as she put down her cup.

“I say, you know!” muttered Joe, shaking his head at me in very serious remonstrance. “Pip, old chap! You’ll
do yourself a mischief. It’ll stick somewhere. You can’t have chawed it, Pip.”

“What’s the matter now?” repeated my sister, more sharply than before.

“If you can cough any trifle on it up, Pip, I’d recommend you to do it,” said Joe, all aghast. “Manners is
manners, but still your elth’s your elth.”

By this time, my sister was quite desperate, so she pounced on Joe, and, taking him by the two whiskers,
knocked his head for a little while against the wall behind him: while I sat in the corner, looking guiltily on.

“Now, perhaps you’ll mention what’s the matter,” said my sister, out of breath, “you staring great stuck
pig.”

Joe looked at her in a helpless way; then took a helpless bite, and looked at me again.
“You know, Pip,” said Joe, solemnly, with his last bite in his cheek and speaking in a confidential voice, as if
we two were quite alone, “you and me is always friends, and I’d be the last to tell upon you, any time. But
such a–” he moved his chair and looked about the floor between us, and then again at me – “such a most
oncommon Bolt as that!”

“Been bolting his food, has he?” cried my sister.

“You know, old chap,” said Joe, looking at me, and not at Mrs. Joe, with his bite still in his cheek, “I Bolted,
myself, when I was your age – frequent – and as a boy I’ve been among a many Bolters; but I never see
your Bolting equal yet, Pip, and it’s a mercy you ain’t Bolted dead.”

My sister made a dive at me, and fished me up by the hair: saying nothing more than the awful words, “You
come along and be dosed.”

Some medical beast had revived Tar-water in those days as a fine medicine, and Mrs. Joe always kept a
supply of it in the cupboard; having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the best of
times, so much of this elixir was administered to me as a choice restorative, that I was conscious of going
about, smelling like a new fence. On this particular evening the urgency of my case demanded a pint of this
mixture, which was poured down my throat, for my greater comfort, while Mrs. Joe held my head under
her arm, as a boot would be held in a boot-jack. Joe got off with half a pint; but was made to swallow that
(much to his disturbance, as he sat slowly munching and meditating before the fire), “because he had had a
turn.” Judging from myself, I should say he certainly had a turn afterwards, if he had had none before.

Conscience is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or boy; but when, in the case of a boy, that secret
burden co-operates with another secret burden down the leg of his trousers, it is (as I can testify) a great
punishment. The guilty knowledge that I was going to rob Mrs. Joe – I never thought I was going to rob Joe,
for I never thought of any of the housekeeping property as his – united to the necessity of always keeping
one hand on my bread-and-butter as I sat, or when I was ordered about the kitchen on any small errand,
almost drove me out of my mind. Then, as the marsh winds made the fire glow and flare, I thought I heard
the voice outside, of the man with the iron on his leg who had sworn me to secrecy, declaring that he
couldn’t and wouldn’t starve until to-morrow, but must be fed now. At other times, I thought, What if the
young man who was with so much difficulty restrained from imbruing his hands in me, should yield to a
constitutional impatience, or should mistake the time, and should think himself accredited to my heart and
liver to-night, instead of to-morrow! If ever anybody’s hair stood on end with terror, mine must have done
so then. But, perhaps, nobody’s ever did?

It was Christmas Eve, and I had to stir the pudding for next day, with a copper-stick, from seven to eight by
the Dutch clock. I tried it with the load upon my leg (and that made me think afresh of the man with the
load on his leg), and found the tendency of exercise to bring the bread-and-butter out at my ankle, quite
unmanageable. Happily, I slipped away, and deposited that part of my conscience in my garret bedroom.
“Hark!” said I, when I had done my stirring, and was taking a final warm in the chimney corner before being
sent up to bed; “was that great guns, Joe?”

“Ah!” said Joe. “There’s another conwict off.”

“What does that mean, Joe?” said I.

Mrs. Joe, who always took explanations upon herself, said, snappishly, “Escaped. Escaped.” Administering
the definition like Tar-water.

While Mrs. Joe sat with her head bending over her needlework, I put my mouth into the forms of saying to
Joe, “What’s a convict?” Joe put his mouth into the forms of returning such a highly elaborate answer, that
I could make out nothing of it but the single word “Pip.”

“There was a conwict off last night,” said Joe, aloud, “after sun-set-gun. And they fired warning of him. And
now, it appears they’re firing warning of another.”

“Who’s firing?” said I.

“Drat that boy,” interposed my sister, frowning at me over her work, “what a questioner he is. Ask no
questions, and you’ll be told no lies.”

It was not very polite to herself, I thought, to imply that I should be told lies by her, even if I did ask
questions. But she never was polite, unless there was company.

At this point, Joe greatly augmented my curiosity by taking the utmost pains to open his mouth very wide,
and to put it into the form of a word that looked to me like “sulks.” Therefore, I naturally pointed to Mrs.
Joe, and put my mouth into the form of saying “her?” But Joe wouldn’t hear of that, at all, and again
opened his mouth very wide, and shook the form of a most emphatic word out of it. But I could make
nothing of the word.

“Mrs. Joe,” said I, as a last resort, “I should like to know – if you wouldn’t much mind – where the firing
comes from?”
“Lord bless the boy!” exclaimed my sister, as if she didn’t quite mean that, but rather the contrary. “From
the Hulks!”

“Oh-h!” said I, looking at Joe. “Hulks!”

Joe gave a reproachful cough, as much as to say, “Well, I told you so.”

“And please what’s Hulks?” said I.

“That’s the way with this boy!” exclaimed my sister, pointing me out with her needle and thread, and
shaking her head at me. “Answer him one question, and he’ll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison-
ships, right ‘cross th’ meshes.” We always used that name for marshes, in our country.

“I wonder who’s put into prison-ships, and why they’re put there?” said I, in a general way, and with quiet
desperation.

It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. “I tell you what, young fellow,” said she, “I didn’t bring
you up by hand to badger people’s lives out. It would be blame to me, and not praise, if I had. People are
put in the Hulks because they murder, and because they rob, and forge, and do all sorts of bad; and they
always begin by asking questions. Now, you get along to bed!”

I was never allowed a candle to light me to bed, and, as I went upstairs in the dark, with my head tingling –
from Mrs. Joe’s thimble having played the tambourine upon it, to accompany her last words – I felt fearfully
sensible of the great convenience that the Hulks were handy for me. I was clearly on my way there. I had
begun by asking questions, and I was going to rob Mrs. Joe.

Since that time, which is far enough away now, I have often thought that few people know what secrecy
there is in the young, under terror. No matter how unreasonable the terror, so that it be terror. I was in
mortal terror of the young man who wanted my heart and liver; I was in mortal terror of my interlocutor
with the ironed leg; I was in mortal terror of myself, from whom an awful promise had been extracted; I
had no hope of deliverance through my all-powerful sister, who repulsed me at every turn; I am afraid to
think of what I might have done, on requirement, in the secrecy of my terror.

If I slept at all that night, it was only to imagine myself drifting down the river on a strong spring-tide, to the
Hulks; a ghostly pirate calling out to me through a speaking-trumpet, as I passed the gibbet-station, that I
had better come ashore and be hanged there at once, and not put it off. I was afraid to sleep, even if I had
been inclined, for I knew that at the first faint dawn of morning I must rob the pantry. There was no doing it
in the night, for there was no getting a light by easy friction then; to have got one, I must have struck it out
of flint and steel, and have made a noise like the very pirate himself rattling his chains.

As soon as the great black velvet pall outside my little window was shot with grey, I got up and went down
stairs; every board upon the way, and every crack in every board, calling after me, “Stop thief!” and “Get
up, Mrs. Joe!” In the pantry, which was far more abundantly supplied than usual, owing to the season, I was
very much alarmed, by a hare hanging up by the heels, whom I rather thought I caught, when my back was
half turned, winking. I had no time for verification, no time for selection, no time for anything, for I had no
time to spare. I stole some bread, some rind of cheese, about half a jar of mincemeat (which I tied up in my
pocket-handkerchief with my last night’s slice), some brandy from a stone bottle (which I decanted into a
glass bottle I had secretly used for making that intoxicating fluid, Spanish-liquorice-water, up in my room:
diluting the stone bottle from a jug in the kitchen cupboard), a meat bone with very little on it, and a
beautiful round compact pork pie. I was nearly going away without the pie, but I was tempted to mount
upon a shelf, to look what it was that was put away so carefully in a covered earthen ware dish in a corner,
and I found it was the pie, and I took it, in the hope that it was not intended for early use, and would not be
missed for some time.

There was a door in the kitchen, communicating with the forge; I unlocked and unbolted that door, and got
a file from among Joe’s tools. Then, I put the fastenings as I had found them, opened the door at which I
had entered when I ran home last night, shut it, and ran for the misty marshes.

Chapter 3

It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if
some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief. Now, I saw
the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of spiders’ webs; hanging itself from
twig to twig and blade to blade. On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy; and the marsh-mist was so thick,
that the wooden finger on the post directing people to our village – a direction which they never accepted,
for they never came there – was invisible to me until I was quite close under it. Then, as I looked up at it,
while it dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a phantom devoting me to the Hulks.

The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that instead of my running at everything,
everything seemed to run at me. This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and dykes and
banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly as could be, “A boy with Somebody-
else’s pork pie! Stop him!” The cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring out of their eyes, and
steaming out of their nostrils, “Holloa, young thief!” One black ox, with a white cravat on – who even had
to my awakened conscience something of a clerical air – fixed me so obstinately with his eyes, and moved
his blunt head round in such an accusatory manner as I moved round, that I blubbered out to him, “I
couldn’t help it, sir! It wasn’t for myself I took it!” Upon which he put down his head, blew a cloud of smoke
out of his nose, and vanished with a kick-up of his hind-legs and a flourish of his tail.
All this time, I was getting on towards the river; but however fast I went, I couldn’t warm my feet, to which
the damp cold seemed riveted, as the iron was riveted to the leg of the man I was running to meet. I knew
my way to the Battery, pretty straight, for I had been down there on a Sunday with Joe, and Joe, sitting on
an old gun, had told me that when I was ‘prentice to him regularly bound, we would have such Larks there!
However, in the confusion of the mist, I found myself at last too far to the right, and consequently had to
try back along the river-side, on the bank of loose stones above the mud and the stakes that staked the tide
out. Making my way along here with all despatch, I had just crossed a ditch which I knew to be very near
the Battery, and had just scrambled up the mound beyond the ditch, when I saw the man sitting before me.
His back was towards me, and he had his arms folded, and was nodding forward, heavy with sleep.

I thought he would be more glad if I came upon him with his breakfast, in that unexpected manner, so I
went forward softly and touched him on the shoulder. He instantly jumped up, and it was not the same
man, but another man!

And yet this man was dressed in coarse grey, too, and had a great iron on his leg, and was lame, and
hoarse, and cold, and was everything that the other man was; except that he had not the same face, and
had a flat broad-brimmed low-crowned felt that on. All this, I saw in a moment, for I had only a moment to
see it in: he swore an oath at me, made a hit at me – it was a round weak blow that missed me and almost
knocked himself down, for it made him stumble – and then he ran into the mist, stumbling twice as he
went, and I lost him.

“It’s the young man!” I thought, feeling my heart shoot as I identified him. I dare say I should have felt a
pain in my liver, too, if I had known where it was.

I was soon at the Battery, after that, and there was the right man-hugging himself and limping to and fro, as
if he had never all night left off hugging and limping – waiting for me. He was awfully cold, to be sure. I half
expected to see him drop down before my face and die of deadly cold. His eyes looked so awfully hungry,
too, that when I handed him the file and he laid it down on the grass, it occurred to me he would have tried
to eat it, if he had not seen my bundle. He did not turn me upside down, this time, to get at what I had, but
left me right side upwards while I opened the bundle and emptied my pockets.

“What’s in the bottle, boy?” said he.

“Brandy,” said I.

He was already handing mincemeat down his throat in the most curious manner – more like a man who
was putting it away somewhere in a violent hurry, than a man who was eating it – but he left off to take
some of the liquor. He shivered all the while, so violently, that it was quite as much as he could do to keep
the neck of the bottle between his teeth, without biting it off.
“I think you have got the ague,” said I.

“I’m much of your opinion, boy,” said he.

“It’s bad about here,” I told him. “You’ve been lying out on the meshes, and they’re dreadful aguish.
Rheumatic too.”

“I’ll eat my breakfast afore they’re the death of me,” said he. “I’d do that, if I was going to be strung up to
that there gallows as there is over there, directly afterwards. I’ll beat the shivers so far, I’ll bet you.”

He was gobbling mincemeat, meatbone, bread, cheese, and pork pie, all at once: staring distrustfully while
he did so at the mist all round us, and often stopping – even stopping his jaws – to listen. Some real or
fancied sound, some clink upon the river or breathing of beast upon the marsh, now gave him a start, and
he said, suddenly:

“You’re not a deceiving imp? You brought no one with you?”

“No, sir! No!”

“Nor giv’ no one the office to follow you?”

“No!”

“Well,” said he, “I believe you. You’d be but a fierce young hound indeed, if at your time of life you could
help to hunt a wretched warmint, hunted as near death and dunghill as this poor wretched warmint is!”

Something clicked in his throat, as if he had works in him like a clock, and was going to strike. And he
smeared his ragged rough sleeve over his eyes.

Pitying his desolation, and watching him as he gradually settled down upon the pie, I made bold to say, “I
am glad you enjoy it.”

“Did you speak?”

“I said I was glad you enjoyed it.”

“Thankee, my boy. I do.”

I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now noticed a decided similarity between the
dog’s way of eating, and the man’s. The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the dog. He
swallowed, or rather snapped up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast; and he looked sideways here and
there while he ate, as if he thought there was danger in every direction, of somebody’s coming to take the
pie away. He was altogether too unsettled in his mind over it, to appreciate it comfortably, I thought, or to
have anybody to dine with him, without making a chop with his jaws at the visitor. In all of which
particulars he was very like the dog.

“I am afraid you won’t leave any of it for him,” said I, timidly; after a silence during which I had hesitated as
to the politeness of making the remark. “There’s no more to be got where that came from.” It was the
certainty of this fact that impelled me to offer the hint.

“Leave any for him? Who’s him?” said my friend, stopping in his crunching of pie-crust.

“The young man. That you spoke of. That was hid with you.”

“Oh ah!” he returned, with something like a gruff laugh. “Him? Yes, yes! He don’t want no wittles.”

“I thought he looked as if he did,” said I.

The man stopped eating, and regarded me with the keenest scrutiny and the greatest surprise.

“Looked? When?”

“Just now.”

“Where?”

“Yonder,” said I, pointing; “over there, where I found him nodding asleep, and thought it was you.”
He held me by the collar and stared at me so, that I began to think his first idea about cutting my throat had
revived.

“Dressed like you, you know, only with a hat,” I explained, trembling; “and – and” – I was very anxious to
put this delicately – “and with – the same reason for wanting to borrow a file. Didn’t you hear the cannon
last night?”

“Then, there was firing!” he said to himself.

“I wonder you shouldn’t have been sure of that,” I returned, “for we heard it up at home, and that’s further
away, and we were shut in besides.”

“Why, see now!” said he. “When a man’s alone on these flats, with a light head and a light stomach,
perishing of cold and want, he hears nothin’ all night, but guns firing, and voices calling. Hears? He sees the
soldiers, with their red coats lighted up by the torches carried afore, closing in round him. Hears his number
called, hears himself challenged, hears the rattle of the muskets, hears the orders ‘Make ready! Present!
Cover him steady, men!’ and is laid hands on – and there’s nothin’! Why, if I see one pursuing party last
night – coming up in order, Damn ’em, with their tramp, tramp – I see a hundred. And as to firing! Why, I
see the mist shake with the cannon, arter it was broad day – But this man;” he had said all the rest, as if he
had forgotten my being there; “did you notice anything in him?”

“He had a badly bruised face,” said I, recalling what I hardly knew I knew.

“Not here?” exclaimed the man, striking his left cheek mercilessly, with the flat of his hand.

“Yes, there!”

“Where is he?” He crammed what little food was left, into the breast of his grey jacket. “Show me the way
he went. I’ll pull him down, like a bloodhound. Curse this iron on my sore leg! Give us hold of the file, boy.”

I indicated in what direction the mist had shrouded the other man, and he looked up at it for an instant. But
he was down on the rank wet grass, filing at his iron like a madman, and not minding me or minding his
own leg, which had an old chafe upon it and was bloody, but which he handled as roughly as if it had no
more feeling in it than the file. I was very much afraid of him again, now that he had worked himself into
this fierce hurry, and I was likewise very much afraid of keeping away from home any longer. I told him I
must go, but he took no notice, so I thought the best thing I could do was to slip off. The last I saw of him,
his head was bent over his knee and he was working hard at his fetter, muttering impatient imprecations at
it and at his leg. The last I heard of him, I stopped in the mist to listen, and the file was still going.
Chapter 4

I fully expected to find a Constable in the kitchen, waiting to take me up. But not only was there no
Constable there, but no discovery had yet been made of the robbery. Mrs. Joe was prodigiously busy in
getting the house ready for the festivities of the day, and Joe had been put upon the kitchen door-step to
keep him out of the dust-pan – an article into which his destiny always led him sooner or later, when my
sister was vigorously reaping the floors of her establishment.

“And where the deuce ha’ you been?” was Mrs. Joe’s Christmas salutation, when I and my conscience
showed ourselves.

I said I had been down to hear the Carols. “Ah! well!” observed Mrs. Joe. “You might ha’ done worse.” Not
a doubt of that, I thought.

“Perhaps if I warn’t a blacksmith’s wife, and (what’s the same thing) a slave with her apron never off, I
should have been to hear the Carols,” said Mrs. Joe. “I’m rather partial to Carols, myself, and that’s the best
of reasons for my never hearing any.”

Joe, who had ventured into the kitchen after me as the dust-pan had retired before us, drew the back of his
hand across his nose with a conciliatory air when Mrs. Joe darted a look at him, and, when her eyes were
withdrawn, secretly crossed his two forefingers, and exhibited them to me, as our token that Mrs. Joe was
in a cross temper. This was so much her normal state, that Joe and I would often, for weeks together, be, as
to our fingers, like monumental Crusaders as to their legs.

We were to have a superb dinner, consisting of a leg of pickled pork and greens, and a pair of roast stuffed
fowls. A handsome mince-pie had been made yesterday morning (which accounted for the mincemeat not
being missed), and the pudding was already on the boil. These extensive arrangements occasioned us to be
cut off unceremoniously in respect of breakfast; “for I an’t,” said Mrs. Joe, “I an’t a-going to have no formal
cramming and busting and washing up now, with what I’ve got before me, I promise you!”

So, we had our slices served out, as if we were two thousand troops on a forced march instead of a man
and boy at home; and we took gulps of milk and water, with apologetic countenances, from a jug on the
dresser. In the meantime, Mrs. Joe put clean white curtains up, and tacked a new flowered-flounce across
the wide chimney to replace the old one, and uncovered the little state parlour across the passage, which
was never uncovered at any other time, but passed the rest of the year in a cool haze of silver paper, which
even extended to the four little white crockery poodles on the mantelshelf, each with a black nose and a
basket of flowers in his mouth, and each the counterpart of the other. Mrs. Joe was a very clean
housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable
than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.
My sister having so much to do, was going to church vicariously; that is to say, Joe and I were going. In his
working clothes, Joe was a well-knit characteristic-looking blacksmith; in his holiday clothes, he was more
like a scarecrow in good circumstances, than anything else. Nothing that he wore then, fitted him or
seemed to belong to him; and everything that he wore then, grazed him. On the present festive occasion
he emerged from his room, when the blithe bells were going, the picture of misery, in a full suit of Sunday
penitentials. As to me, I think my sister must have had some general idea that I was a young offender whom
an Accoucheur Policemen had taken up (on my birthday) and delivered over to her, to be dealt with
according to the outraged majesty of the law. I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born, in
opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuading arguments of my
best friends. Even when I was taken to have a new suit of clothes, the tailor had orders to make them like a
kind of Reformatory, and on no account to let me have the free use of my limbs.

Joe and I going to church, therefore, must have been a moving spectacle for compassionate minds. Yet,
what I suffered outside, was nothing to what I underwent within. The terrors that had assailed me
whenever Mrs. Joe had gone near the pantry, or out of the room, were only to be equalled by the remorse
with which my mind dwelt on what my hands had done. Under the weight of my wicked secret, I pondered
whether the Church would be powerful enough to shield me from the vengeance of the terrible young
man, if I divulged to that establishment. I conceived the idea that the time when the banns were read and
when the clergyman said, “Ye are now to declare it!” would be the time for me to rise and propose a
private conference in the vestry. I am far from being sure that I might not have astonished our small
congregation by resorting to this extreme measure, but for its being Christmas Day and no Sunday.

Mr. Wopsle, the clerk at church, was to dine with us; and Mr. Hubble the wheelwright and Mrs. Hubble;
and Uncle Pumblechook (Joe’s uncle, but Mrs. Joe appropriated him), who was a well-to-do corn-chandler
in the nearest town, and drove his own chaise-cart. The dinner hour was half-past one. When Joe and I got
home, we found the table laid, and Mrs. Joe dressed, and the dinner dressing, and the front door unlocked
(it never was at any other time) for the company to enter by, and everything most splendid. And still, not a
word of the robbery.

The time came, without bringing with it any relief to my feelings, and the company came. Mr. Wopsle,
united to a Roman nose and a large shining bald forehead, had a deep voice which he was uncommonly
proud of; indeed it was understood among his acquaintance that if you could only give him his head, he
would read the clergyman into fits; he himself confessed that if the Church was “thrown open,” meaning to
competition, he would not despair of making his mark in it. The Church not being “thrown open,” he was,
as I have said, our clerk. But he punished the Amens tremendously; and when he gave out the psalm –
always giving the whole verse – he looked all round the congregation first, as much as to say, “You have
heard my friend overhead; oblige me with your opinion of this style!”

I opened the door to the company – making believe that it was a habit of ours to open that door – and I
opened it first to Mr. Wopsle, next to Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, and last of all to Uncle Pumblechook. N.B., I was
not allowed to call him uncle, under the severest penalties.
“Mrs. Joe,” said Uncle Pumblechook: a large hard-breathing middle-aged slow man, with a mouth like a
fish, dull staring eyes, and sandy hair standing upright on his head, so that he looked as if he had just been
all but choked, and had that moment come to; “I have brought you, as the compliments of the season – I
have brought you, Mum, a bottle of sherry wine – and I have brought you, Mum, a bottle of port wine.”

Every Christmas Day he presented himself, as a profound novelty, with exactly the same words, and
carrying the two bottles like dumb-bells. Every Christmas Day, Mrs. Joe replied, as she now replied, “Oh, Un
– cle Pum – ble – chook! This IS kind!” Every Christmas Day, he retorted, as he now retorted, “It’s no more
than your merits. And now are you all bobbish, and how’s Sixpennorth of halfpence?” meaning me.

We dined on these occasions in the kitchen, and adjourned, for the nuts and oranges and apples, to the
parlour; which was a change very like Joe’s change from his working clothes to his Sunday dress. My sister
was uncommonly lively on the present occasion, and indeed was generally more gracious in the society of
Mrs. Hubble than in other company. I remember Mrs. Hubble as a little curly sharp-edged person in sky-
blue, who held a conventionally juvenile position, because she had married Mr. Hubble – I don’t know at
what remote period – when she was much younger than he. I remember Mr Hubble as a tough high-
shouldered stooping old man, of a sawdusty fragrance, with his legs extraordinarily wide apart: so that in
my short days I always saw some miles of open country between them when I met him coming up the lane.

Among this good company I should have felt myself, even if I hadn’t robbed the pantry, in a false position.
Not because I was squeezed in at an acute angle of the table-cloth, with the table in my chest, and the
Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I was not allowed to speak (I didn’t want to speak), nor
because I was regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure corners of
pork of which the pig, when living, had had the least reason to be vain. No; I should not have minded that,
if they would only have left me alone. But they wouldn’t leave me alone. They seemed to think the
opportunity lost, if they failed to point the conversation at me, every now and then, and stick the point into
me. I might have been an unfortunate little bull in a Spanish arena, I got so smartingly touched up by these
moral goads.

It began the moment we sat down to dinner. Mr. Wopsle said grace with theatrical declamation – as it now
appears to me, something like a religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the Third – and ended
with the very proper aspiration that we might be truly grateful. Upon which my sister fixed me with her
eye, and said, in a low reproachful voice, “Do you hear that? Be grateful.”

“Especially,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “be grateful, boy, to them which brought you up by hand.”

Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful presentiment that I should come to no
good, asked, “Why is it that the young are never grateful?” This moral mystery seemed too much for the
company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying, “Naterally wicious.” Everybody then murmured
“True!” and looked at me in a particularly unpleasant and personal manner.
Joe’s station and influence were something feebler (if possible) when there was company, than when there
was none. But he always aided and comforted me when he could, in some way of his own, and he always
did so at dinner-time by giving me gravy, if there were any. There being plenty of gravy to-day, Joe spooned
into my plate, at this point, about half a pint.

A little later on in the dinner, Mr. Wopsle reviewed the sermon with some severity, and intimated – in the
usual hypothetical case of the Church being “thrown open” – what kind of sermon he would have given
them. After favouring them with some heads of that discourse, he remarked that he considered the subject
of the day’s homily, ill-chosen; which was the less excusable, he added, when there were so many subjects
“going about.”

“True again,” said Uncle Pumblechook. “You’ve hit it, sir! Plenty of subjects going about, for them that
know how to put salt upon their tails. That’s what’s wanted. A man needn’t go far to find a subject, if he’s
ready with his salt-box.” Mr. Pumblechook added, after a short interval of reflection, “Look at Pork alone.
There’s a subject! If you want a subject, look at Pork!”

“True, sir. Many a moral for the young,” returned Mr. Wopsle; and I knew he was going to lug me in, before
he said it; “might be deduced from that text.”

(“You listen to this,” said my sister to me, in a severe parenthesis.)

Joe gave me some more gravy.

“Swine,” pursued Mr. Wopsle, in his deepest voice, and pointing his fork at my blushes, as if he were
mentioning my Christian name; “Swine were the companions of the prodigal. The gluttony of Swine is put
before us, as an example to the young.” (I thought this pretty well in him who had been praising up the
pork for being so plump and juicy.) “What is detestable in a pig, is more detestable in a boy.”

“Or girl,” suggested Mr. Hubble.

“Of course, or girl, Mr. Hubble,” assented Mr. Wopsle, rather irritably, “but there is no girl present.”

“Besides,” said Mr. Pumblechook, turning sharp on me, “think what you’ve got to be grateful for. If you’d
been born a Squeaker–”
“He was, if ever a child was,” said my sister, most emphatically.

Joe gave me some more gravy.

“Well, but I mean a four-footed Squeaker,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “If you had been born such, would you
have been here now? Not you–”

“Unless in that form,” said Mr. Wopsle, nodding towards the dish.

“But I don’t mean in that form, sir,” returned Mr. Pumblechook, who had an objection to being interrupted;
“I mean, enjoying himself with his elders and betters, and improving himself with their conversation, and
rolling in the lap of luxury. Would he have been doing that? No, he wouldn’t. And what would have been
your destination?” turning on me again. “You would have been disposed of for so many shillings according
to the market price of the article, and Dunstable the butcher would have come up to you as you lay in your
straw, and he would have whipped you under his left arm, and with his right he would have tucked up his
frock to get a penknife from out of his waistcoat-pocket, and he would have shed your blood and had your
life. No bringing up by hand then. Not a bit of it!”

Joe offered me more gravy, which I was afraid to take.

“He was a world of trouble to you, ma’am,” said Mrs. Hubble, commiserating my sister.

“Trouble?” echoed my sister; “trouble?” and then entered on a fearful catalogue of all the illnesses I had
been guilty of, and all the acts of sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high places I had tumbled from,
and all the low places I had tumbled into, and all the injuries I had done myself, and all the times she had
wished me in my grave, and I had contumaciously refused to go there.

I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very much, with their noses. Perhaps, they became
the restless people they were, in consequence. Anyhow, Mr. Wopsle’s Roman nose so aggravated me,
during the recital of my misdemeanours, that I should have liked to pull it until he howled. But, all I had
endured up to this time, was nothing in comparison with the awful feelings that took possession of me
when the pause was broken which ensued upon my sister’s recital, and in which pause everybody had
looked at me (as I felt painfully conscious) with indignation and abhorrence.

“Yet,” said Mr. Pumblechook, leading the company gently back to the theme from which they had strayed,
“Pork – regarded as biled – is rich, too; ain’t it?”
“Have a little brandy, uncle,” said my sister.

O Heavens, it had come at last! He would find it was weak, he would say it was weak, and I was lost! I held
tight to the leg of the table under the cloth, with both hands, and awaited my fate.

My sister went for the stone bottle, came back with the stone bottle, and poured his brandy out: no one
else taking any. The wretched man trifled with his glass – took it up, looked at it through the light, put it
down – prolonged my misery. All this time, Mrs. Joe and Joe were briskly clearing the table for the pie and
pudding.

I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. Always holding tight by the leg of the table with my hands and feet, I saw
the miserable creature finger his glass playfully, take it up, smile, throw his head back, and drink the brandy
off. Instantly afterwards, the company were seized with unspeakable consternation, owing to his springing
to his feet, turning round several times in an appalling spasmodic whooping-cough dance, and rushing out
at the door; he then became visible through the window, violently plunging and expectorating, making the
most hideous faces, and apparently out of his mind.

I held on tight, while Mrs. Joe and Joe ran to him. I didn’t know how I had done it, but I had no doubt I had
murdered him somehow. In my dreadful situation, it was a relief when he was brought back, and, surveying
the company all round as if they had disagreed with him, sank down into his chair with the one significant
gasp, “Tar!”

I had filled up the bottle from the tar-water jug. I knew he would be worse by-and-by. I moved the table,
like a Medium of the present day, by the vigour of my unseen hold upon it.

“Tar!” cried my sister, in amazement. “Why, how ever could Tar come there?”

But, Uncle Pumblechook, who was omnipotent in that kitchen, wouldn’t hear the word, wouldn’t hear of
the subject, imperiously waved it all away with his hand, and asked for hot gin-and-water. My sister, who
had begun to be alarmingly meditative, had to employ herself actively in getting the gin, the hot water, the
sugar, and the lemon-peel, and mixing them. For the time being at least, I was saved. I still held on to the
leg of the table, but clutched it now with the fervour of gratitude.

By degrees, I became calm enough to release my grasp and partake of pudding. Mr. Pumblechook partook
of pudding. All partook of pudding. The course terminated, and Mr. Pumblechook had begun to beam
under the genial influence of gin-and-water. I began to think I should get over the day, when my sister said
to Joe, “Clean plates – cold.”
I clutched the leg of the table again immediately, and pressed it to my bosom as if it had been the
companion of my youth and friend of my soul. I foresaw what was coming, and I felt that this time I really
was gone.

“You must taste,” said my sister, addressing the guests with her best grace, “You must taste, to finish with,
such a delightful and delicious present of Uncle Pumblechook’s!”

Must they! Let them not hope to taste it!

“You must know,” said my sister, rising, “it’s a pie; a savoury pork pie.”

The company murmured their compliments. Uncle Pumblechook, sensible of having deserved well of his
fellow-creatures, said – quite vivaciously, all things considered – “Well, Mrs. Joe, we’ll do our best
endeavours; let us have a cut at this same pie.”

My sister went out to get it. I heard her steps proceed to the pantry. I saw Mr. Pumblechook balance his
knife. I saw re-awakening appetite in the Roman nostrils of Mr. Wopsle. I heard Mr. Hubble remark that “a
bit of savoury pork pie would lay atop of anything you could mention, and do no harm,” and I heard Joe
say, “You shall have some, Pip.” I have never been absolutely certain whether I uttered a shrill yell of terror,
merely in spirit, or in the bodily hearing of the company. I felt that I could bear no more, and that I must
run away. I released the leg of the table, and ran for my life.

But, I ran no further than the house door, for there I ran head foremost into a party of soldiers with their
muskets: one of whom held out a pair of handcuffs to me, saying, “Here you are, look sharp, come on!”

Chapter 5

The apparition of a file of soldiers ringing down the butt-ends of their loaded muskets on our door-step,
caused the dinner-party to rise from table in confusion, and caused Mrs. Joe re-entering the kitchen empty-
handed, to stop short and stare, in her wondering lament of “Gracious goodness gracious me, what’s gone
– with the – pie!”

The sergeant and I were in the kitchen when Mrs. Joe stood staring; at which crisis I partially recovered the
use of my senses. It was the sergeant who had spoken to me, and he was now looking round at the
company, with his handcuffs invitingly extended towards them in his right hand, and his left on my
shoulder.
“Excuse me, ladies and gentleman,” said the sergeant, “but as I have mentioned at the door to this smart
young shaver” (which he hadn’t), “I am on a chase in the name of the king, and I want the blacksmith.”

“And pray what might you want with him?” retorted my sister, quick to resent his being wanted at all.

“Missis,” returned the gallant sergeant, “speaking for myself, I should reply, the honour and pleasure of his
fine wife’s acquaintance; speaking for the king, I answer, a little job done.”

This was received as rather neat in the sergeant; insomuch that Mr Pumblechook cried audibly, “Good
again!”

“You see, blacksmith,” said the sergeant, who had by this time picked out Joe with his eye, “we have had an
accident with these, and I find the lock of one of ’em goes wrong, and the coupling don’t act pretty. As they
are wanted for immediate service, will you throw your eye over them?”

Joe threw his eye over them, and pronounced that the job would necessitate the lighting of his forge fire,
and would take nearer two hours than one, “Will it? Then will you set about it at once, blacksmith?” said
the off-hand sergeant, “as it’s on his Majesty’s service. And if my men can beat a hand anywhere, they’ll
make themselves useful.” With that, he called to his men, who came trooping into the kitchen one after
another, and piled their arms in a corner. And then they stood about, as soldiers do; now, with their hands
loosely clasped before them; now, resting a knee or a shoulder; now, easing a belt or a pouch; now,
opening the door to spit stiffly over their high stocks, out into the yard.

All these things I saw without then knowing that I saw them, for I was in an agony of apprehension. But,
beginning to perceive that the handcuffs were not for me, and that the military had so far got the better of
the pie as to put it in the background, I collected a little more of my scattered wits.

“Would you give me the Time?” said the sergeant, addressing himself to Mr. Pumblechook, as to a man
whose appreciative powers justified the inference that he was equal to the time.

“It’s just gone half-past two.”

“That’s not so bad,” said the sergeant, reflecting; “even if I was forced to halt here nigh two hours, that’ll
do. How far might you call yourselves from the marshes, hereabouts? Not above a mile, I reckon?”

“Just a mile,” said Mrs. Joe.

“That’ll do. We begin to close in upon ’em about dusk. A little before dusk, my orders are. That’ll do.”

“Convicts, sergeant?” asked Mr. Wopsle, in a matter-of-course way.

“Ay!” returned the sergeant, “two. They’re pretty well known to be out on the marshes still, and they won’t
try to get clear of ’em before dusk. Anybody here seen anything of any such game?”

Everybody, myself excepted, said no, with confidence. Nobody thought of me.

“Well!” said the sergeant, “they’ll find themselves trapped in a circle, I expect, sooner than they count on.
Now, blacksmith! If you’re ready, his Majesty the King is.”

Joe had got his coat and waistcoat and cravat off, and his leather apron on, and passed into the forge. One
of the soldiers opened its wooden windows, another lighted the fire, another turned to at the bellows, the
rest stood round the blaze, which was soon roaring. Then Joe began to hammer and clink, hammer and
clink, and we all looked on.

The interest of the impending pursuit not only absorbed the general attention, but even made my sister
liberal. She drew a pitcher of beer from the cask, for the soldiers, and invited the sergeant to take a glass of
brandy. But Mr. Pumblechook said, sharply, “Give him wine, Mum. I’ll engage there’s no Tar in that:” so,
the sergeant thanked him and said that as he preferred his drink without tar, he would take wine, if it was
equally convenient. When it was given him, he drank his Majesty’s health and Compliments of the Season,
and took it all at a mouthful and smacked his lips.

“Good stuff, eh, sergeant?” said Mr. Pumblechook.

“I’ll tell you something,” returned the sergeant; “I suspect that stuff’s of your providing.”

Mr. Pumblechook, with a fat sort of laugh, said, “Ay, ay? Why?”

“Because,” returned the sergeant, clapping him on the shoulder, “you’re a man that knows what’s what.”

“D’ye think so?” said Mr. Pumblechook, with his former laugh. “Have another glass!”
“With you. Hob and nob,” returned the sergeant. “The top of mine to the foot of yours – the foot of yours
to the top of mine – Ring once, ring twice – the best tune on the Musical Glasses! Your health. May you live
a thousand years, and never be a worse judge of the right sort than you are at the present moment of your
life!”

The sergeant tossed off his glass again and seemed quite ready for another glass. I noticed that Mr.
Pumblechook in his hospitality appeared to forget that he had made a present of the wine, but took the
bottle from Mrs. Joe and had all the credit of handing it about in a gush of joviality. Even I got some. And he
was so very free of the wine that he even called for the other bottle, and handed that about with the same
liberality, when the first was gone.

As I watched them while they all stood clustering about the forge, enjoying themselves so much, I thought
what terrible good sauce for a dinner my fugitive friend on the marshes was. They had not enjoyed
themselves a quarter so much, before the entertainment was brightened with the excitement he furnished.
And now, when they were all in lively anticipation of “the two villains” being taken, and when the bellows
seemed to roar for the fugitives, the fire to flare for them, the smoke to hurry away in pursuit of them, Joe
to hammer and clink for them, and all the murky shadows on the wall to shake at them in menace as the
blaze rose and sank and the red-hot sparks dropped and died, the pale after-noon outside, almost seemed
in my pitying young fancy to have turned pale on their account, poor wretches.

At last, Joe’s job was done, and the ringing and roaring stopped. As Joe got on his coat, he mustered
courage to propose that some of us should go down with the soldiers and see what came of the hunt. Mr.
Pumblechook and Mr. Hubble declined, on the plea of a pipe and ladies’ society; but Mr. Wopsle said he
would go, if Joe would. Joe said he was agreeable, and would take me, if Mrs. Joe approved. We never
should have got leave to go, I am sure, but for Mrs. Joe’s curiosity to know all about it and how it ended. As
it was, she merely stipulated, “If you bring the boy back with his head blown to bits by a musket, don’t look
to me to put it together again.”

The sergeant took a polite leave of the ladies, and parted from Mr. Pumblechook as from a comrade;
though I doubt if he were quite as fully sensible of that gentleman’s merits under arid conditions, as when
something moist was going. His men resumed their muskets and fell in. Mr. Wopsle, Joe, and I, received
strict charge to keep in the rear, and to speak no word after we reached the marshes. When we were all
out in the raw air and were steadily moving towards our business, I treasonably whispered to Joe, “I hope,
Joe, we shan’t find them.” and Joe whispered to me, “I’d give a shilling if they had cut and run, Pip.”

We were joined by no stragglers from the village, for the weather was cold and threatening, the way
dreary, the footing bad, darkness coming on, and the people had good fires in-doors and were keeping the
day. A few faces hurried to glowing windows and looked after us, but none came out. We passed the finger-
post, and held straight on to the churchyard. There, we were stopped a few minutes by a signal from the
sergeant’s hand, while two or three of his men dispersed themselves among the graves, and also examined
the porch. They came in again without finding anything, and then we struck out on the open marshes,
through the gate at the side of the churchyard. A bitter sleet came rattling against us here on the east wind,
and Joe took me on his back.

Now that we were out upon the dismal wilderness where they little thought I had been within eight or nine
hours and had seen both men hiding, I considered for the first time, with great dread, if we should come
upon them, would my particular convict suppose that it was I who had brought the soldiers there? He had
asked me if I was a deceiving imp, and he had said I should be a fierce young hound if I joined the hunt
against him. Would he believe that I was both imp and hound in treacherous earnest, and had betrayed
him?

It was of no use asking myself this question now. There I was, on Joe’s back, and there was Joe beneath me,
charging at the ditches like a hunter, and stimulating Mr. Wopsle not to tumble on his Roman nose, and to
keep up with us. The soldiers were in front of us, extending into a pretty wide line with an interval between
man and man. We were taking the course I had begun with, and from which I had diverged in the mist.
Either the mist was not out again yet, or the wind had dispelled it. Under the low red glare of sunset, the
beacon, and the gibbet, and the mound of the Battery, and the opposite shore of the river, were plain,
though all of a watery lead colour.

With my heart thumping like a blacksmith at Joe’s broad shoulder, I looked all about for any sign of the
convicts. I could see none, I could hear none. Mr. Wopsle had greatly alarmed me more than once, by his
blowing and hard breathing; but I knew the sounds by this time, and could dissociate them from the object
of pursuit. I got a dreadful start, when I thought I heard the file still going; but it was only a sheep bell. The
sheep stopped in their eating and looked timidly at us; and the cattle, their heads turned from the wind and
sleet, stared angrily as if they held us responsible for both annoyances; but, except these things, and the
shudder of the dying day in every blade of grass, there was no break in the bleak stillness of the marshes.

The soldiers were moving on in the direction of the old Battery, and we were moving on a little way behind
them, when, all of a sudden, we all stopped. For, there had reached us on the wings of the wind and rain, a
long shout. It was repeated. It was at a distance towards the east, but it was long and loud. Nay, there
seemed to be two or more shouts raised together – if one might judge from a confusion in the sound.

To this effect the sergeant and the nearest men were speaking under their breath, when Joe and I came up.
After another moment’s listening, Joe (who was a good judge) agreed, and Mr. Wopsle (who was a bad
judge) agreed. The sergeant, a decisive man, ordered that the sound should not be answered, but that the
course should be changed, and that his men should make towards it “at the double.” So we slanted to the
right (where the East was), and Joe pounded away so wonderfully, that I had to hold on tight to keep my
seat.

It was a run indeed now, and what Joe called, in the only two words he spoke all the time, “a Winder.”
Down banks and up banks, and over gates, and splashing into dykes, and breaking among coarse rushes: no
man cared where he went. As we came nearer to the shouting, it became more and more apparent that it
was made by more than one voice. Sometimes, it seemed to stop altogether, and then the soldiers
stopped. When it broke out again, the soldiers made for it at a greater rate than ever, and we after them.
After a while, we had so run it down, that we could hear one voice calling “Murder!” and another voice,
“Convicts! Runaways! Guard! This way for the runaway convicts!” Then both voices would seem to be
stifled in a struggle, and then would break out again. And when it had come to this, the soldiers ran like
deer, and Joe too.

The sergeant ran in first, when we had run the noise quite down, and two of his men ran in close upon him.
Their pieces were cocked and levelled when we all ran in.

“Here are both men!” panted the sergeant, struggling at the bottom of a ditch. “Surrender, you two! and
confound you for two wild beasts! Come asunder!”

Water was splashing, and mud was flying, and oaths were being sworn, and blows were being struck, when
some more men went down into the ditch to help the sergeant, and dragged out, separately, my convict
and the other one. Both were bleeding and panting and execrating and struggling; but of course I knew
them both directly.

“Mind!” said my convict, wiping blood from his face with his ragged sleeves, and shaking torn hair from his
fingers: “I took him! I give him up to you! Mind that!”

“It’s not much to be particular about,” said the sergeant; “it’ll do you small good, my man, being in the
same plight yourself. Handcuffs there!”

“I don’t expect it to do me any good. I don’t want it to do me more good than it does now,” said my
convict, with a greedy laugh. “I took him. He knows it. That’s enough for me.”

The other convict was livid to look at, and, in addition to the old bruised left side of his face, seemed to be
bruised and torn all over. He could not so much as get his breath to speak, until they were both separately
handcuffed, but leaned upon a soldier to keep himself from falling.

“Take notice, guard – he tried to murder me,” were his first words.

“Tried to murder him?” said my convict, disdainfully. “Try, and not do it? I took him, and giv’ him up; that’s
what I done. I not only prevented him getting off the marshes, but I dragged him here – dragged him this
far on his way back. He’s a gentleman, if you please, this villain. Now, the Hulks has got its gentleman again,
through me. Murder him? Worth my while, too, to murder him, when I could do worse and drag him back!”
The other one still gasped, “He tried – he tried – to – murder me. Bear – bear witness.”

“Lookee here!” said my convict to the sergeant. “Single-handed I got clear of the prison-ship; I made a dash
and I done it. I could ha’ got clear of these death-cold flats likewise – look at my leg: you won’t find much
iron on it – if I hadn’t made the discovery that he was here. Let him go free? Let him profit by the means as
I found out? Let him make a tool of me afresh and again? Once more? No, no, no. If I had died at the
bottom there;” and he made an emphatic swing at the ditch with his manacled hands; “I’d have held to him
with that grip, that you should have been safe to find him in my hold.”

The other fugitive, who was evidently in extreme horror of his companion, repeated, “He tried to murder
me. I should have been a dead man if you had not come up.”

“He lies!” said my convict, with fierce energy. “He’s a liar born, and he’ll die a liar. Look at his face; ain’t it
written there? Let him turn those eyes of his on me. I defy him to do it.”

The other, with an effort at a scornful smile – which could not, however, collect the nervous working of his
mouth into any set expression – looked at the soldiers, and looked about at the marshes and at the sky, but
certainly did not look at the speaker.

“Do you see him?” pursued my convict. “Do you see what a villain he is? Do you see those grovelling and
wandering eyes? That’s how he looked when we were tried together. He never looked at me.”

The other, always working and working his dry lips and turning his eyes restlessly about him far and near,
did at last turn them for a moment on the speaker, with the words, “You are not much to look at,” and with
a half-taunting glance at the bound hands. At that point, my convict became so frantically exasperated, that
he would have rushed upon him but for the interposition of the soldiers. “Didn’t I tell you,” said the other
convict then, “that he would murder me, if he could?” And any one could see that he shook with fear, and
that there broke out upon his lips, curious white flakes, like thin snow.

“Enough of this parley,” said the sergeant. “Light those torches.”

As one of the soldiers, who carried a basket in lieu of a gun, went down on his knee to open it, my convict
looked round him for the first time, and saw me. I had alighted from Joe’s back on the brink of the ditch
when we came up, and had not moved since. I looked at him eagerly when he looked at me, and slightly
moved my hands and shook my head. I had been waiting for him to see me, that I might try to assure him
of my innocence. It was not at all expressed to me that he even comprehended my intention, for he gave
me a look that I did not understand, and it all passed in a moment. But if he had looked at me for an hour
or for a day, I could not have remembered his face ever afterwards, as having been more attentive.

The soldier with the basket soon got a light, and lighted three or four torches, and took one himself and
distributed the others. It had been almost dark before, but now it seemed quite dark, and soon afterwards
very dark. Before we departed from that spot, four soldiers standing in a ring, fired twice into the air.
Presently we saw other torches kindled at some distance behind us, and others on the marshes on the
opposite bank of the river. “All right,” said the sergeant. “March.”

We had not gone far when three cannon were fired ahead of us with a sound that seemed to burst
something inside my ear. “You are expected on board,” said the sergeant to my convict; “they know you
are coming. Don’t straggle, my man. Close up here.”

The two were kept apart, and each walked surrounded by a separate guard. I had hold of Joe’s hand now,
and Joe carried one of the torches. Mr. Wopsle had been for going back, but Joe was resolved to see it out,
so we went on with the party. There was a reasonably good path now, mostly on the edge of the river, with
a divergence here and there where a dyke came, with a miniature windmill on it and a muddy sluice-gate.
When I looked round, I could see the other lights coming in after us. The torches we carried, dropped great
blotches of fire upon the track, and I could see those, too, lying smoking and flaring. I could see nothing else
but black darkness. Our lights warmed the air about us with their pitchy blaze, and the two prisoners
seemed rather to like that, as they limped along in the midst of the muskets. We could not go fast, because
of their lameness; and they were so spent, that two or three times we had to halt while they rested.

After an hour or so of this travelling, we came to a rough wooden hut and a landing-place. There was a
guard in the hut, and they challenged, and the sergeant answered. Then, we went into the hut where there
was a smell of tobacco and whitewash, and a bright fire, and a lamp, and a stand of muskets, and a drum,
and a low wooden bedstead, like an overgrown mangle without the machinery, capable of holding about a
dozen soldiers all at once. Three or four soldiers who lay upon it in their great-coats, were not much
interested in us, but just lifted their heads and took a sleepy stare, and then lay down again. The sergeant
made some kind of report, and some entry in a book, and then the convict whom I call the other convict
was drafted off with his guard, to go on board first.

My convict never looked at me, except that once. While we stood in the hut, he stood before the fire
looking thoughtfully at it, or putting up his feet by turns upon the hob, and looking thoughtfully at them as
if he pitied them for their recent adventures. Suddenly, he turned to the sergeant, and remarked:

“I wish to say something respecting this escape. It may prevent some persons laying under suspicion
alonger me.”
“You can say what you like,” returned the sergeant, standing coolly looking at him with his arms folded,
“but you have no call to say it here. You’ll have opportunity enough to say about it, and hear about it,
before it’s done with, you know.”

“I know, but this is another pint, a separate matter. A man can’t starve; at least I can’t. I took some wittles,
up at the willage over yonder – where the church stands a’most out on the marshes.”

“You mean stole,” said the sergeant.

“And I’ll tell you where from. From the blacksmith’s.”

“Halloa!” said the sergeant, staring at Joe.

“Halloa, Pip!” said Joe, staring at me.

“It was some broken wittles – that’s what it was – and a dram of liquor, and a pie.”

“Have you happened to miss such an article as a pie, blacksmith?” asked the sergeant, confidentially.

“My wife did, at the very moment when you came in. Don’t you know, Pip?”

“So,” said my convict, turning his eyes on Joe in a moody manner, and without the least glance at me; “so
you’re the blacksmith, are you? Than I’m sorry to say, I’ve eat your pie.”

“God knows you’re welcome to it – so far as it was ever mine,” returned Joe, with a saving remembrance of
Mrs. Joe. “We don’t know what you have done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor
miserable fellow-creatur. – Would us, Pip?”

The something that I had noticed before, clicked in the man’s throat again, and he turned his back. The
boat had returned, and his guard were ready, so we followed him to the landing-place made of rough
stakes and stones, and saw him put into the boat, which was rowed by a crew of convicts like himself. No
one seemed surprised to see him, or interested in seeing him, or glad to see him, or sorry to see him, or
spoke a word, except that somebody in the boat growled as if to dogs, “Give way, you!” which was the
signal for the dip of the oars. By the light of the torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from
the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains,
the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes to be ironed like the prisoners. We saw the boat go alongside,
and we saw him taken up the side and disappear. Then, the ends of the torches were flung hissing into the
water, and went out, as if it were all over with him.

Chapter 6

My state of mind regarding the pilfering from which I had been so unexpectedly exonerated, did not impel
me to frank disclosure; but I hope it had some dregs of good at the bottom of it.

I do not recall that I felt any tenderness of conscience in reference to Mrs. Joe, when the fear of being
found out was lifted off me. But I loved Joe – perhaps for no better reason in those early days than because
the dear fellow let me love him – and, as to him, my inner self was not so easily composed. It was much
upon my mind (particularly when I first saw him looking about for his file) that I ought to tell Joe the whole
truth. Yet I did not, and for the reason that I mistrusted that if I did, he would think me worse than I was.
The fear of losing Joe’s confidence, and of thenceforth sitting in the chimney-corner at night staring drearily
at my for ever lost companion and friend, tied up my tongue. I morbidly represented to myself that if Joe
knew it, I never afterwards could see him at the fireside feeling his fair whisker, without thinking that he
was meditating on it. That, if Joe knew it, I never afterwards could see him glance, however casually, at
yesterday’s meat or pudding when it came on to-day’s table, without thinking that he was debating
whether I had been in the pantry. That, if Joe knew it, and at any subsequent period of our joint domestic
life remarked that his beer was flat or thick, the conviction that he suspected Tar in it, would bring a rush of
blood to my face. In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to
avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. I had had no intercourse with the world at that time, and I imitated
none of its many inhabitants who act in this manner. Quite an untaught genius, I made the discovery of the
line of action for myself.

As I was sleepy before we were far away from the prison-ship, Joe took me on his back again and carried
me home. He must have had a tiresome journey of it, for Mr. Wopsle, being knocked up, was in such a very
bad temper that if the Church had been thrown open, he would probably have excommunicated the whole
expedition, beginning with Joe and myself. In his lay capacity, he persisted in sitting down in the damp to
such an insane extent, that when his coat was taken off to be dried at the kitchen fire, the circumstantial
evidence on his trousers would have hanged him if it had been a capital offence.

By that time, I was staggering on the kitchen floor like a little drunkard, through having been newly set
upon my feet, and through having been fast asleep, and through waking in the heat and lights and noise of
tongues. As I came to myself (with the aid of a heavy thump between the shoulders, and the restorative
exclamation “Yah! Was there ever such a boy as this!” from my sister), I found Joe telling them about the
convict’s confession, and all the visitors suggesting different ways by which he had got into the pantry. Mr.
Pumblechook made out, after carefully surveying the premises, that he had first got upon the roof of the
forge, and had then got upon the roof of the house, and had then let himself down the kitchen chimney by
a rope made of his bedding cut into strips; and as Mr. Pumblechook was very positive and drove his own
chaise-cart – over everybody – it was agreed that it must be so. Mr. Wopsle, indeed, wildly cried out “No!”
with the feeble malice of a tired man; but, as he had no theory, and no coat on, he was unanimously set at
nought – not to mention his smoking hard behind, as he stood with his back to the kitchen fire to draw the
damp out: which was not calculated to inspire confidence.

This was all I heard that night before my sister clutched me, as a slumberous offence to the company’s
eyesight, and assisted me up to bed with such a strong hand that I seemed to have fifty boots on, and to be
dangling them all against the edges of the stairs. My state of mind, as I have described it, began before I
was up in the morning, and lasted long after the subject had died out, and had ceased to be mentioned
saving on exceptional occasions.

Chapter 7

At the time when I stood in the churchyard, reading the family tombstones, I had just enough learning to be
able to spell them out. My construction even of their simple meaning was not very correct, for I read “wife
of the Above” as a complimentary reference to my father’s exaltation to a better world; and if any one of
my deceased relations had been referred to as “Below,” I have no doubt I should have formed the worst
opinions of that member of the family. Neither, were my notions of the theological positions to which my
Catechism bound me, at all accurate; for, I have a lively remembrance that I supposed my declaration that I
was to “walk in the same all the days of my life,” laid me under an obligation always to go through the
village from our house in one particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down by the
wheelwright’s or up by the mill.

When I was old enough, I was to be apprenticed to Joe, and until I could assume that dignity I was not to be
what Mrs. Joe called “Pompeyed,” or (as I render it) pampered. Therefore, I was not only odd-boy about
the forge, but if any neighbour happened to want an extra boy to frighten birds, or pick up stones, or do
any such job, I was favoured with the employment. In order, however, that our superior position might not
be compromised thereby, a money-box was kept on the kitchen mantel-shelf, in to which it was publicly
made known that all my earnings were dropped. I have an impression that they were to be contributed
eventually towards the liquidation of the National Debt, but I know I had no hope of any personal
participation in the treasure.

Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that is to say, she was a ridiculous old
woman of limited means and unlimited infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening,
in the society of youth who paid twopence per week each, for the improving opportunity of seeing her do
it. She rented a small cottage, and Mr. Wopsle had the room up-stairs, where we students used to overhear
him reading aloud in a most dignified and terrific manner, and occasionally bumping on the ceiling. There
was a fiction that Mr. Wopsle “examined” the scholars, once a quarter. What he did on those occasions was
to turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us Mark Antony’s oration over the body of Caesar. This was
always followed by Collins’s Ode on the Passions, wherein I particularly venerated Mr. Wopsle as Revenge,
throwing his blood-stained sword in thunder down, and taking the War-denouncing trumpet with a
withering look. It was not with me then, as it was in later life, when I fell into the society of the Passions,
and compared them with Collins and Wopsle, rather to the disadvantage of both gentlemen.
Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, besides keeping this Educational Institution, kept – in the same room – a little
general shop. She had no idea what stock she had, or what the price of anything in it was; but there was a
little greasy memorandum-book kept in a drawer, which served as a Catalogue of Prices, and by this oracle
Biddy arranged all the shop transaction. Biddy was Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s granddaughter; I confess
myself quiet unequal to the working out of the problem, what relation she was to Mr. Wopsle. She was an
orphan like myself; like me, too, had been brought up by hand. She was most noticeable, I thought, in
respect of her extremities; for, her hair always wanted brushing, her hands always wanted washing, and
her shoes always wanted mending and pulling up at heel. This description must be received with a week-
day limitation. On Sundays, she went to church elaborated.

Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, I struggled
through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every
letter. After that, I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed every evening to do something
new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a purblind groping way, to read,
write, and cipher, on the very smallest scale.

One night, I was sitting in the chimney-corner with my slate, expending great efforts on the production of a
letter to Joe. I think it must have been a fully year after our hunt upon the marshes, for it was a long time
after, and it was winter and a hard frost. With an alphabet on the hearth at my feet for reference, I
contrived in an hour or two to print and smear this epistle:

Epistle

There was no indispensable necessity for my communicating with Joe by letter, inasmuch as he sat beside
me and we were alone. But, I delivered this written communication (slate and all) with my own hand, and
Joe received it as a miracle of erudition.

“I say, Pip, old chap!” cried Joe, opening his blue eyes wide, “what a scholar you are! An’t you?”

“I should like to be,” said I, glancing at the slate as he held it: with a misgiving that the writing was rather
hilly.

“Why, here’s a J,” said Joe, “and a O equal to anythink! Here’s a J and a O, Pip, and a J-O, Joe.”

Pip's first letter

I had never heard Joe read aloud to any greater extent than this monosyllable, and I had observed at
church last Sunday when I accidentally held our Prayer-Book upside down, that it seemed to suit his
convenience quite as well as if it had been all right. Wishing to embrace the present occasion of finding out
whether in teaching Joe, I should have to begin quite at the beginning, I said, “Ah! But read the rest, Jo.”

“The rest, eh, Pip?” said Joe, looking at it with a slowly searching eye, “One, two, three. Why, here’s three
Js, and three Os, and three J-O, Joes in it, Pip!”

I leaned over Joe, and, with the aid of my forefinger, read him the whole letter.

“Astonishing!” said Joe, when I had finished. “You ARE a scholar.”

“How do you spell Gargery, Joe?” I asked him, with a modest patronage.

“I don’t spell it at all,” said Joe.

“But supposing you did?”

“It can’t be supposed,” said Joe. “Tho’ I’m oncommon fond of reading, too.”

“Are you, Joe?”

“On-common. Give me,” said Joe, “a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire,
and I ask no better. Lord!” he continued, after rubbing his knees a little, “when you do come to a J and a O,
and says you, “Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,” how interesting reading is!”

I derived from this last, that Joe’s education, like Steam, was yet in its infancy, Pursuing the subject, I
inquired:

“Didn’t you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”

“No, Pip.”

“Why didn’t you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”
“Well, Pip,” said Joe, taking up the poker, and settling himself to his usual occupation when he was
thoughtful, of slowly raking the fire between the lower bars: “I’ll tell you. My father, Pip, he were given to
drink, and when he were overtook with drink, he hammered away at my mother, most onmerciful. It were
a’most the only hammering he did, indeed, ‘xcepting at myself. And he hammered at me with a wigour only
to be equalled by the wigour with which he didn’t hammer at his anwil. – You’re a-listening and
understanding, Pip?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“‘Consequence, my mother and me we ran away from my father, several times; and then my mother she’d
go out to work, and she’d say, “Joe,” she’d say, “now, please God, you shall have some schooling, child,”
and she’d put me to school. But my father were that good in his hart that he couldn’t abear to be without
us. So, he’d come with a most tremenjous crowd and make such a row at the doors of the houses where we
was, that they used to be obligated to have no more to do with us and to give us up to him. And then he
took us home and hammered us. Which, you see, Pip,” said Joe, pausing in his meditative raking of the fire,
and looking at me, “were a drawback on my learning.”

“Certainly, poor Joe!”

“Though mind you, Pip,” said Joe, with a judicial touch or two of the poker on the top bar, “rendering unto
all their doo, and maintaining equal justice betwixt man and man, my father were that good in his hart,
don’t you see?”

I didn’t see; but I didn’t say so.

“Well!” Joe pursued, “somebody must keep the pot a biling, Pip, or the pot won’t bile, don’t you know?”

I saw that, and said so.

“‘Consequence, my father didn’t make objections to my going to work; so I went to work to work at my
present calling, which were his too, if he would have followed it, and I worked tolerable hard, I assure you,
Pip. In time I were able to keep him, and I kept him till he went off in a purple leptic fit. And it were my
intentions to have had put upon his tombstone that Whatsume’er the failings on his part, Remember
reader he were that good in his hart.”

Joe recited this couplet with such manifest pride and careful perspicuity, that I asked him if he had made it
himself.
“I made it,” said Joe, “my own self. I made it in a moment. It was like striking out a horseshoe complete, in a
single blow. I never was so much surprised in all my life – couldn’t credit my own ed – to tell you the truth,
hardly believed it were my own ed. As I was saying, Pip, it were my intentions to have had it cut over him;
but poetry costs money, cut it how you will, small or large, and it were not done. Not to mention bearers,
all the money that could be spared were wanted for my mother. She were in poor elth, and quite broke.
She weren’t long of following, poor soul, and her share of peace come round at last.”

Joe’s blue eyes turned a little watery; he rubbed, first one of them, and then the other, in a most
uncongenial and uncomfortable manner, with the round knob on the top of the poker.

“It were but lonesome then,” said Joe, “living here alone, and I got acquainted with your sister. Now, Pip;”
Joe looked firmly at me, as if he knew I was not going to agree with him; “your sister is a fine figure of a
woman.”

I could not help looking at the fire, in an obvious state of doubt.

“Whatever family opinions, or whatever the world’s opinions, on that subject may be, Pip, your sister is,”
Joe tapped the top bar with the poker after every word following, “a – fine – figure – of – a – woman!”

I could think of nothing better to say than “I am glad you think so, Joe.”

“So am I,” returned Joe, catching me up. “I am glad I think so, Pip. A little redness or a little matter of Bone,
here or there, what does it signify to Me?”

I sagaciously observed, if it didn’t signify to him, to whom did it signify?

“Certainly!” assented Joe. “That’s it. You’re right, old chap! When I got acquainted with your sister, it were
the talk how she was bringing you up by hand. Very kind of her too, all the folks said, and I said, along with
all the folks. As to you,” Joe pursued with a countenance expressive of seeing something very nasty indeed:
“if you could have been aware how small and flabby and mean you was, dear me, you’d have formed the
most contemptible opinion of yourself!”

Not exactly relishing this, I said, “Never mind me, Joe.”

“But I did mind you, Pip,” he returned with tender simplicity. “When I offered to your sister to keep
company, and to be asked in church at such times as she was willing and ready to come to the forge, I said
to her, ‘And bring the poor little child. God bless the poor little child,’ I said to your sister, ‘there’s room for
him at the forge!'”

I broke out crying and begging pardon, and hugged Joe round the neck: who dropped the poker to hug me,
and to say, “Ever the best of friends; an’t us, Pip? Don’t cry, old chap!”

When this little interruption was over, Joe resumed:

“Well, you see, Pip, and here we are! That’s about where it lights; here we are! Now, when you take me in
hand in my learning, Pip (and I tell you beforehand I am awful dull, most awful dull), Mrs. Joe mustn’t see
too much of what we’re up to. It must be done, as I may say, on the sly. And why on the sly? I’ll tell you
why, Pip.”

He had taken up the poker again; without which, I doubt if he could have proceeded in his demonstration.

“Your sister is given to government.”

“Given to government, Joe?” I was startled, for I had some shadowy idea (and I am afraid I must add, hope)
that Joe had divorced her in a favour of the Lords of the Admiralty, or Treasury.

“Given to government,” said Joe. “Which I meantersay the government of you and myself.”

“Oh!”

“And she an’t over partial to having scholars on the premises,” Joe continued, “and in partickler would not
be over partial to my being a scholar, for fear as I might rise. Like a sort or rebel, don’t you see?”

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