object), and you save a good deal of the attitude of opening oysters, on
the part of the right elbow."

He offered these friendly suggestions in such a lively way, that we both
laughed and I scarcely blushed.

"Now," he pursued, "concerning Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham, you must
know, was a spoilt child. Her mother died when she was a baby, and her
father denied her nothing. Her father was a country gentleman down in
your part of the world, and was a brewer. I don't know why it should
be a crack thing to be a brewer; but it is indisputable that while you
cannot possibly be genteel and bake, you may be as genteel as never was
and brew. You see it every day."

"Yet a gentleman may not keep a public-house; may he?" said I.

"Not on any account," returned Herbert; "but a public-house may keep a
gentleman. Well! Mr. Havisham was very rich and very proud. So was his
daughter."

"Miss Havisham was an only child?" I hazarded.

"Stop a moment, I am coming to that. No, she was not an only child;
she had a half-brother. Her father privately married again--his cook, I
rather think."

"I thought he was proud," said I.

"My good Handel, so he was. He married his second wife privately,
because he was proud, and in course of time she died. When she was dead,
I apprehend he first told his daughter what he had done, and then
the son became a part of the family, residing in the house you are
acquainted with. As the son grew a young man, he turned out riotous,
extravagant, undutiful,--altogether bad. At last his father disinherited
him; but he softened when he was dying, and left him well off, though
not nearly so well off as Miss Havisham.--Take another glass of wine,
and excuse my mentioning that society as a body does not expect one
to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one's glass, as to turn it
bottom upwards with the rim on one's nose."

I had been doing this, in an excess of attention to his recital. I
thanked him, and apologized. He said, "Not at all," and resumed.

"Miss Havisham was now an heiress, and you may suppose was looked after
as a great match. Her half-brother had now ample means again, but what
with debts and what with new madness wasted them most fearfully again.
There were stronger differences between him and her than there had been
between him and his father, and it is suspected that he cherished a deep
and mortal grudge against her as having influenced the father's anger.
Now, I come to the cruel p