story as it were, " there is a perfectly open
understanding between us. All that I know about
Miss Havisham, you know."

"And all that I know," I retorted, " you
know."

"I fully believe it. So there can be no
competition or perplexity between you and me. And
as to the condition on which you hold your
advancement in life—namely, that you are not to
inquire or discuss to whom you owe it—you
may be very sure that it will never be
encroached upon, or even approached, by me, or
by any one belonging to me."

In truth, he said this with so much delicacy,
that I felt the subject done with, even though I
should be under his father's roof for years and
years to come. Yet he said it with so much
meaning, too, that I felt he as perfectly understood
Miss Havisham to be my benefactress,
as I understood the fact myself.

It had not occurred to me before, that he had
led up to the theme for the purpose of clearing
it out of our way; but we were so much the
lighter and easier for having broached it, that I
now perceived this to be the case. We were
very gay and sociable, and I asked him, in the
course of conversation, what he was? He
replied, " A capitalist—an Insurer of Ships." I
suppose he saw me glancing about the room
in search of some tokens of Shipping, or capital,
for he added, " In the City."

I had grand ideas of the wealth and importance
of Insurers of Ships in the City, and I began
to think with awe of having laid a young Insurer
on his back, blackened his enterprising eye, and
cut his responsible head open. But, again,
there came upon me, for my relief, that odd
impression that Herbert Pocket would never be
very successful or rich.

"I shall not rest satisfied with merely
employing my capital in insuring ships. I shall
buy up some good Life Assurance shares, and
cut into the Direction. I shall also do a little
in the mining way. None of these things will
interfere with my chartering a few thousand
tons on my own account. I think I shall trade,"
said he, leaning back in his chair, " to the East
Indies, for silks, shawls, spices, dyes, drugs, and
precious woods. It's an interesting trade."

"And the profits are large?" said I.

"Tremendous!" said he.

I wavered again, and began to think here
were greater expectations than my own.

"I think I shall trade, also," said he, putting
his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, " to the
West Indies, for sugar, tobacco, and rum. Also
to Ceylon, specially for elephants' tusks."

"You will want a good many ships," said I.

"A perfect fleet," said he.

Quite overpowered by the magnificence of
these transactions, I asked him where the ships
he insured mostly traded to at present?

"I haven't begun insuring yet," he replied.
"I am looking about me."

Somehow, that pursuit seemed more in keeping
with Barnard's Inn. I said (in a tone of
conviction) "Ah-h!"

"Yes. I am in a counting-house, and looking
about me."

"Is a counting-house profitable?" I asked.

"To—do you mean to the young fellow
who's in it?" he asked, in reply.

"Yes; to you."

"Why, n-no: not to me." He said this
with the air of one carefully reckoning up and
striking a balance. "Not directly profitable.
That is, it doesn't pay me anything, and I have
to—keep myself."

This certainly had not a profitable appearance,
and I shook my head as if I would imply that
it would be difficult to lay by much accumulative
capital from such a source of income.

"But the thing is," said Herbert Pocket,
"that you look about you. That's the grand
thing. You are in a counting-house, you know,
and you look about you."

It struck me as a singular implication that you
couldn't be out of a counting-house, you know,
and look about you; but I silently deferred to his
experience.

"Then the time comes," said Herbert, " when
you see your opening. And you go in and you
swoop upon it and you make your capital, and
then there you are! When you have once
made your capital, you have nothing to do but
employ it."

This was very like his way of conducting
that encounter in the garden; very like. His
manner of bearing his poverty, too, exactly
corresponded to his manner of bearing that defeat.
It seemed to me that he took all blows and
buffets now, with just the same air as he had
taken mine then. It was evident that he had
nothing around him but the simplest necessaries,
for everything that I remarked upon, turned out
to have been sent in on my account from the
coffee-house or somewhere else.

Yet, having already made his fortune in his
own mind, he was so unassuming with it that I
felt quite grateful to him for not being puffed
up. It was a pleasant addition to his naturally
pleasant ways, and we got on famously. In the
evening we went out for a walk in the streets,
and went half-price to the Theatre; and next
day we went to church at Westminster Abbey,
and in the afternoon we walked in the Parks;
and I wondered who shod all the horses there,
and wished Joe did.

On a moderate computation, it was many
months, that Sunday, since I had left Joe and
Biddy. The space interposed between myself
and them, partook of that expansion, and our
marshes were any distance off. That I could
have been at our old church in my old church-
going clothes, on the very last Sunday that ever
was, seemed a combination of impossibilities,
geographical and social, solar and lunar. Yet
in the London streets so crowded with people
and so brilliantly lighted in the dusk of evening,
there were depressing hints of reproaches
for that I had put the poor old kitchen at
home so far away; and in the dead of night,
the footsteps of some incapable impostor of
a porter mooning about Barnard's Inn, under