CHAPTER II.

MY sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than
twenty years older than I, and had established a
great reputation with herself and the neighbours
because she had brought me up "by hand."
Having at that time to find out for myself what
the expression meant, and knowing her to have
a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the
habit of laying it upon her husband as well as
upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I
were both brought up by hand.

She was not a good-looking woman, my sister;
and I had a general impression that she must
have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. Joe
was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each
side of his smooth face, and with eyes of such a
very undecided blue that they seemed to have
somehow got mixed with their own whites. He
was a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-
going, foolish, dear fellow—a sort of Hercules
in strength, and also in weakness.

My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes,
had such a prevailing redness of skin that I
sometimes used to wonder whether it was
possible she washed herself with a nutmeg-grater
instead of soap. She was tall and bony, and
almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over
her figure behind with two loops, and having a
square impregnable bib in front that was stuck
full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful
merit in herself, and a strong reproach against
Joe, that she wore this apron so much. Though
I really see no reason why she should have
worn it at all: or why, if she did wear it at all,
she should not have taken it off, every day of her
life.

Joe's forge adjoined our house, which was a
wooden house, as many of the dwellings in our
country were—most of them, at that time.
When I ran home from the churchyard, the forge
was shut up, and Joe was sitting alone in the
kitchen. Joe and I being fellow-sufferers, and
having confidences as such, Joe imparted a
confidence to me, the moment I raised the latch of
the door and peeped in at him opposite to it,
sitting in the chimney corner.

"Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking
for you, Pip. And she's out now, making it a
baker's dozen."

"Is she?"

"Yes, Pip," said Joe; "and what's worse,
she's got Tickler with her."

At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only
button on my waistcoat round and round, and
looked in great depression at the fire. Tickler
was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by
collision with my tickled frame.

"She sot down," said Joe, "and she got up,
and she made a grab at Tickler, and she Ram-
paged out. That's what she did," said Joe,
slowly clearing the fire between the lower bars
with the poker, and looking at it:" she Ram-
paged out, Pip."

"Has she been gone long, Joe?" I always
treated him as a larger species of child, and as
no more than my equal.

" Well," said Joe, glancing up at the Dutch
clock, " she's been on the Ram-page, this last
spell, about five minutes, Pip. She's a coming!
Get behind the door, old chap, and have the jack-
towel betwixt you."

I took the advice. My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing
the door wide open, and finding an obstruction
behind it, immediately divined the cause,
and applied Tickler to its further investigation.
She concluded by throwing me—I often served
her as a connubial missile—at Joe, who, glad to
get hold of me on any terms, passed me on into the
chimney and quietly fenced me up there with his
great leg.

"Where have you been, you young monkey?"
said Mrs. Joe, stamping her foot. "Tell me
directly what you've been doing to wear me
away with fret and fright and worrit, or I'd
have you out of that corner if you was fifty
Pips and he was five hundred Gargerys."

"I have only been to the churchyard," said
I, from my stool, crying and rubbing myself.

"Churchyard!" repeated my sister. "If it
warn't for me you'd have been to the churchyard
long ago, and stayed there. Who brought
you up by hand?"

"You did," said I.

"And why did I do it, I should like to
know!" exclaimed my sister.

I whimpered, "I don't know."

"I don't!" said my sister. "I'd never do it
again! I know that. I may truly say I've never
had this apron of mine off, since born you were.
It's bad enough to be a blacksmith's wife (and
him a Gargery), without being your mother."

My thoughts strayed from that question as I
looked disconsolately at the fire. For, the fugitive
out on the marshes with the ironed leg, the
mysterious young man, the file, the food,
and the dreadful pledge I was under to commit
a larceny on those sheltering premises, rose
before me in the avenging coals.

"Hah!" said Mrs. Joe, restoring Tickler to
his station. "Churchyard, indeed! You may
well say churchyard, you two." One of us, by-
the-by, had not said it at all. "You'll drive me to
the churchyard betwixt you, one of these days,
and oh, a pr-r-recious pair you'd be without
me!"

As she applied herself to set the tea-things,
Joe peeped down at me over his leg, as if he
were mentally casting me and himself up, and
calculating what kind of pair we practically
should make, under the grievous circumstances
foreshadowed. After that, he sat feeling his
right-side flaxen curls and whisker, and following
Mrs. Joe about with his blue eyes, as his
manner always was at squally times.

My sister had a trenchant way of cutting
our bread-and-butter for us, that never varied.
First, with her left hand she jammed the loaf hard
and fast against her bib—where it sometimes
got a pin into it, and sometimes a needle, which
we afterwards got into our mouths. Then, she
took some butter (not too much) on a knife and
spread it on the loaf, in an apothecary kind of
way as if she were making a plaister—using
both sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity,