ts, and spitting the shells about.--As I really think I should have
liked to do myself, if I had been in their place and so despised.

At length, it was voted that there was no help for the angry gentleman,
and that he must either go in his chance company or remain behind. So he
got into his place, still making complaints, and the keeper got into the
place next him, and the convicts hauled themselves up as well as they
could, and the convict I had recognized sat behind me with his breath on
the hair of my head.

"Good by, Handel!" Herbert called out as we started. I thought what a
blessed fortune it was, that he had found another name for me than Pip.

It is impossible to express with what acuteness I felt the convict's
breathing, not only on the back of my head, but all along my spine. The
sensation was like being touched in the marrow with some pungent and
searching acid, it set my very teeth on edge. He seemed to have more
breathing business to do than another man, and to make more noise in
doing it; and I was conscious of growing high-shouldered on one side, in
my shrinking endeavors to fend him off.

The weather was miserably raw, and the two cursed the cold. It made us
all lethargic before we had gone far, and when we had left the Half-way
House behind, we habitually dozed and shivered and were silent. I dozed
off, myself, in considering the question whether I ought to restore a
couple of pounds sterling to this creature before losing sight of him,
and how it could best be done. In the act of dipping forward as if I
were going to bathe among the horses, I woke in a fright and took the
question up again.

But I must have lost it longer than I had thought, since, although
I could recognize nothing in the darkness and the fitful lights and
shadows of our lamps, I traced marsh country in the cold damp wind that
blew at us. Cowering forward for warmth and to make me a screen against
the wind, the convicts were closer to me than before. The very first
words I heard them interchange as I became conscious, were the words of
my own thought, "Two One Pound notes."

"How did he get 'em?" said the convict I had never seen.

"How should I know?" returned the other. "He had 'em stowed away
somehows. Giv him by friends, I expect."

"I wish," said the other, with a bitter curse upon the cold, "that I had
'em here."

"Two one pound notes, or friends?"

"Two one pound notes. I'd sell all the friends I ever had for one, a