Great Expectations

Mill Pond Bank, and Chinks's Basin, and the Old Green Copper Ropewalk,

all so clear and plain! Provis in his rooms, the signal whose use was

over, pretty Clara, the good motherly woman, old Bill Barley on his

back, all drifting by, as on the swift stream of my life fast running

out to sea!

"You with a uncle too! Why, I know'd you at Gargery's when you was so

small a wolf that I could have took your weazen betwixt this finger and

thumb and chucked you away dead (as I'd thoughts o' doing, odd times,

when I see you loitering amongst the pollards on a Sunday), and you

hadn't found no uncles then. No, not you! But when Old Orlick come for

to hear that your uncle Provis had most like wore the leg-iron wot Old

Orlick had picked up, filed asunder, on these meshes ever so many year

ago, and wot he kep by him till he dropped your sister with it, like

a bullock, as he means to drop you--hey?--when he come for to hear

that--hey?"

In his savage taunting, he flared the candle so close at me that I

turned my face aside to save it from the flame.

"Ah!" he cried, laughing, after doing it again, "the burnt child dreads

the fire! Old Orlick knowed you was burnt, Old Orlick knowed you was

smuggling your uncle Provis away, Old Orlick's a match for you and

know'd you'd come to-night! Now I'll tell you something more, wolf, and

this ends it. There's them that's as good a match for your uncle Provis

as Old Orlick has been for you. Let him 'ware them, when he's lost his

nevvy! Let him 'ware them, when no man can't find a rag of his dear

relation's clothes, nor yet a bone of his body. There's them that can't

and that won't have Magwitch,--yes, I know the name!--alive in the same

land with them, and that's had such sure information of him when he

was alive in another land, as that he couldn't and shouldn't leave it

unbeknown and put them in danger. P'raps it's them that writes fifty

hands, and that's not like sneaking you as writes but one. 'Ware

Compeyson, Magwitch, and the gallows!"

He flared the candle at me again, smoking my face and hair, and for an

instant blinding me, and turned his powerful back as he replaced the

light on the table. I had thought a prayer, and had been with Joe and

Biddy and Herbert, before he turned towards me again.

There was a clear space of a few feet between the table and the opposite

wall. Within this space, he now slouched backwards and forwards. His

great strength seemed to sit stronger upon him than ever before, as he

did this with his hands hanging loose and heavy at his sides, and with

his eyes scowling at me. I had no grain of hope left. Wild as my inward

hurry was, and wonderful the force of the pictures that rushed by me

instead of thoughts, I could yet clearly understand that, unless he had

resolved that I was within a few moments of surely perishing out of all

human knowledge, he would never have told me what he had told.