, arter having been day by day
betwixt four walls, you'd envy me. But you don't know what it is."

"I think I know the delights of freedom," I answered.

"Ah," said he, shaking his head gravely. "But you don't know it equal to
me. You must have been under lock and key, dear boy, to know it equal to
me,--but I ain't a going to be low."

It occurred to me as inconsistent, that, for any mastering idea, he
should have endangered his freedom, and even his life. But I reflected
that perhaps freedom without danger was too much apart from all the
habit of his existence to be to him what it would be to another man. I
was not far out, since he said, after smoking a little:--

"You see, dear boy, when I was over yonder, t'other side the world, I
was always a looking to this side; and it come flat to be there, for
all I was a growing rich. Everybody knowed Magwitch, and Magwitch could
come, and Magwitch could go, and nobody's head would be troubled about
him. They ain't so easy concerning me here, dear boy,--wouldn't be,
leastwise, if they knowed where I was."

"If all goes well," said I, "you will be perfectly free and safe again
within a few hours."

"Well," he returned, drawing a long breath, "I hope so."

"And think so?"

He dipped his hand in the water over the boat's gunwale, and said,
smiling with that softened air upon him which was not new to me:--

"Ay, I s'pose I think so, dear boy. We'd be puzzled to be more quiet
and easy-going than we are at present. But--it's a flowing so soft
and pleasant through the water, p'raps, as makes me think it--I was
a thinking through my smoke just then, that we can no more see to the
bottom of the next few hours than we can see to the bottom of this river
what I catches hold of. Nor yet we can't no more hold their tide than
I can hold this. And it's run through my fingers and gone, you see!"
holding up his dripping hand.

"But for your face I should think you were a little despondent," said I.

"Not a bit on it, dear boy! It comes of flowing on so quiet, and of that
there rippling at the boat's head making a sort of a Sunday tune. Maybe
I'm a growing a trifle old besides."

He put his pipe back in his mouth with an undisturbed expression of
face, and sat as composed and contented as if we were already out of
England. Yet he was as submissive to a word of advice as if he had been
in constant terror; for, when we ran ashore to get some bottles of beer
into the boat, and he was