Great Expectations

I got rid of my injured feelings for the time by kicking them into the

brewery wall, and twisting them out of my hair, and then I smoothed my

face with my sleeve, and came from behind the gate. The bread and meat

were acceptable, and the beer was warming and tingling, and I was soon

in spirits to look about me.

To be sure, it was a deserted place, down to the pigeon-house in the

brewery-yard, which had been blown crooked on its pole by some high

wind, and would have made the pigeons think themselves at sea, if there

had been any pigeons there to be rocked by it. But there were no pigeons

in the dove-cot, no horses in the stable, no pigs in the sty, no malt in

the storehouse, no smells of grains and beer in the copper or the vat.

All the uses and scents of the brewery might have evaporated with its

last reek of smoke. In a by-yard, there was a wilderness of empty casks,

which had a certain sour remembrance of better days lingering about

them; but it was too sour to be accepted as a sample of the beer that

was gone,--and in this respect I remember those recluses as being like

most others.

Behind the furthest end of the brewery, was a rank garden with an old

wall; not so high but that I could struggle up and hold on long enough

to look over it, and see that the rank garden was the garden of the

house, and that it was overgrown with tangled weeds, but that there was

a track upon the green and yellow paths, as if some one sometimes walked

there, and that Estella was walking away from me even then. But she

seemed to be everywhere. For when I yielded to the temptation presented

by the casks, and began to walk on them, I saw her walking on them at

the end of the yard of casks. She had her back towards me, and held her

pretty brown hair spread out in her two hands, and never looked round,

and passed out of my view directly. So, in the brewery itself,--by which

I mean the large paved lofty place in which they used to make the beer,

and where the brewing utensils still were. When I first went into it,

and, rather oppressed by its gloom, stood near the door looking about

me, I saw her pass among the extinguished fires, and ascend some light

iron stairs, and go out by a gallery high overhead, as if she were going

out into the sky.