Great Expectations

"How did he get 'em?" said the convict I had never seen.

"How should I know?" returned the other. "He had 'em stowed away

somehows. Giv him by friends, I expect."

"I wish," said the other, with a bitter curse upon the cold, "that I had

'em here."

"Two one pound notes, or friends?"

"Two one pound notes. I'd sell all the friends I ever had for one, and

think it a blessed good bargain. Well? So he says--?"

"So he says," resumed the convict I had recognized,--"it was all

said and done in half a minute, behind a pile of timber in the

Dock-yard,--'You're a going to be discharged?' Yes, I was. Would I find

out that boy that had fed him and kep his secret, and give him them two

one pound notes? Yes, I would. And I did."

"More fool you," growled the other. "I'd have spent 'em on a Man, in

wittles and drink. He must have been a green one. Mean to say he knowed

nothing of you?"

"Not a ha'porth. Different gangs and different ships. He was tried again

for prison breaking, and got made a Lifer."

"And was that--Honor!--the only time you worked out, in this part of the

country?"

"The only time."

"What might have been your opinion of the place?"

"A most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work; work, swamp,

mist, and mudbank."

They both execrated the place in very strong language, and gradually

growled themselves out, and had nothing left to say.

After overhearing this dialogue, I should assuredly have got down and

been left in the solitude and darkness of the highway, but for feeling

certain that the man had no suspicion of my identity. Indeed, I was not

only so changed in the course of nature, but so differently dressed and

so differently circumstanced, that it was not at all likely he could

have known me without accidental help. Still, the coincidence of our

being together on the coach, was sufficiently strange to fill me with a

dread that some other coincidence might at any moment connect me, in his

hearing, with my name. For this reason, I resolved to alight as soon as

we touched the town, and put myself out of his hearing. This device I

executed successfully. My little portmanteau was in the boot under my

feet; I had but to turn a hinge to get it out; I threw it down before

me, got down after it, and was left at the first lamp on the first

stones of the town pavement. As to the convicts, they went their way

with the coach, and I knew at what point they would be spirited off to

the river. In my fancy, I saw the boat with its convict crew waiting for

them at the slime-washed stairs,--again heard the gruff "Give way, you!"

like and order to dogs,--again saw the wicked Noah's Ark lying out on

the black water.