With this project formed, we went to bed. I had the wildest dreams

concerning him, and woke unrefreshed; I woke, too, to recover the

fear which I had lost in the night, of his being found out as a

returned transport. Waking, I never lost that fear.

He came round at the appointed time, took out his jack-knife, and

sat down to his meal. He was full of plans "for his gentleman's

coming out strong, and like a gentleman," and urged me to begin

speedily upon the pocket-book, which he had left in my possession.

He considered the chambers and his own lodging as temporary

residences, and advised me to look out at once for a "fashionable

crib' near Hyde Park, in which he could have "a shake-down'. When

he had made an end of his breakfast, and was wiping his knife on

his leg, I said to him, without a word of preface:

"After you were gone last night, I told my friend of the struggle

that the soldiers found you engaged in on the marshes, when we came

up. You remember?"

"Remember!" said he. "I think so!"

"We want to know something about that man - and about you. It is

strange to know no more about either, and particularly you, than I

was able to tell last night. Is not this as good a time as another

for our knowing more?"

"Well!" he said, after consideration. "You're on your oath, you

know, Pip's comrade?"

"Assuredly," replied Herbert.

"As to anything I say, you know," he insisted. "The oath applies to

all."

"I understand it to do so."

"And look'ee here! Wotever I done, is worked out and paid for," he

insisted again.

"So be it."

He took out his black pipe and was going to fill it with negrohead,

when, looking at the tangle of tobacco in his hand, he seemed to

think it might perplex the thread of his narrative. He put it back

again, stuck his pipe in a button-hole of his coat, spread a hand

on each knee, and, after turning an angry eye on the fire for a few

silent moments, looked round at us and said what follows.

Chapter 42

"Dear boy and Pip's comrade. I am not a-going fur to tell you my

life, like a song or a story-book. But to give it you short and

handy, I'll put it at once into a mouthful of English. In jail and

out of jail, in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail.

There, you got it. That's my life pretty much, down to such times

as I got shipped off, arter Pip stood my friend.

"I've been done everything to, pretty well - except hanged. I've

been locked up, as much as a silver tea-kettle. I've been carted

here and carted there, and put out of this town and put out of that

town, and stuck in the stocks, and whipped and worried and drove.

I've no more notion where I was born, than you have - if so much. I

first become aware of myself, down in Essex, a thieving turnips for

my living. Summun had run away from me - a man - a tinker - and

he'd took the fire with him, and left me wery cold.

"I know'd my name to be Magwitch, chrisen'd Abel. How did I know

it? Much as I know'd the birds' names in the hedges to be

chaffinch, sparrer, thrush. I might have thought it was all lies

together, only as the birds' names come out true, I supposed mine

did.

"So fur as I could find, there warn't a soul that see young Abel

Magwitch, with us little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at

him, and either drove him off, or took him up. I was took up, took

up, took up, to that extent that I reg'larly grow'd up took up.

"This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little creetur as

much to be pitied as ever I see (not that I looked in the glass,

for there warn't many insides of furnished houses known to me), I

got the name of being hardened. "This is a terrible hardened one,"

they says to prison wisitors, picking out me. "May be said to live

in jails, this boy. "Then they looked at me, and I looked at them,

and they measured my head, some on 'em - they had better a-measured

my stomach - and others on 'em giv me tracts what I couldn't read,

and made me speeches what I couldn't understand.