and took the key out. "Yes!"
said he, facing round, after doggedly preceding me a few steps towards
the house. "Here I am!"

"How did you come here?"

"I come her," he retorted, "on my legs. I had my box brought alongside
me in a barrow."

"Are you here for good?"

"I ain't here for harm, young master, I suppose?"

I was not so sure of that. I had leisure to entertain the retort in my
mind, while he slowly lifted his heavy glance from the pavement, up my
legs and arms, to my face.

"Then you have left the forge?" I said.

"Do this look like a forge?" replied Orlick, sending his glance all
round him with an air of injury. "Now, do it look like it?"

I asked him how long he had left Gargery's forge?

"One day is so like another here," he replied, "that I don't know
without casting it up. However, I come here some time since you left."

"I could have told you that, Orlick."

"Ah!" said he, dryly. "But then you've got to be a scholar."

By this time we had come to the house, where I found his room to be one
just within the side-door, with a little window in it looking on the
courtyard. In its small proportions, it was not unlike the kind of place
usually assigned to a gate-porter in Paris. Certain keys were hanging on
the wall, to which he now added the gate key; and his patchwork-covered
bed was in a little inner division or recess. The whole had a slovenly,
confined, and sleepy look, like a cage for a human dormouse; while he,
looming dark and heavy in the shadow of a corner by the window, looked
like the human dormouse for whom it was fitted up,--as indeed he was.

"I never saw this room before," I remarked; "but there used to be no
Porter here."

"No," said he; "not till it got about that there was no protection on
the premises, and it come to be considered dangerous, with convicts and
Tag and Rag and Bobtail going up and down. And then I was recommended to
the place as a man who could give another man as good as he brought, and
I took it. It's easier than bellowsing and hammering.--That's loaded,
that is."

My eye had been caught by a gun with a brass-bound stock over the
chimney-piece, and his eye had followed mine.

"Well," said I, not desirous of more conversation, "shall I go up to
Miss Havisham?"

"Burn me, if I know!" he retorted, first stretching himself and then
shaking himself; "my orders ends here, young master. I give this here
bell a rap with this here hammer, and you go on along the