Great Expectations

"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've 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-kittle. 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. They always went on agen me about the Devil. But what

the Devil was I to do? I must put something into my stomach, mustn't

I?--Howsomever, I'm a getting low, and I know what's due. Dear boy and

Pip's comrade, don't you be afeerd of me being low.