asked Joe whether he had heard if any of the other relations
had any legacies?

"Miss Sarah," said Joe, "she have twenty-five pound perannium fur to
buy pills, on account of being bilious. Miss Georgiana, she have twenty
pound down. Mrs.--what's the name of them wild beasts with humps, old
chap?"

"Camels?" said I, wondering why he could possibly want to know.

Joe nodded. "Mrs. Camels," by which I presently understood he meant
Camilla, "she have five pound fur to buy rushlights to put her in
spirits when she wake up in the night."

The accuracy of these recitals was sufficiently obvious to me, to give
me great confidence in Joe's information. "And now," said Joe, "you
ain't that strong yet, old chap, that you can take in more nor one
additional shovelful to-day. Old Orlick he's been a bustin' open a
dwelling-ouse."

"Whose?" said I.

"Not, I grant you, but what his manners is given to blusterous," said
Joe, apologetically; "still, a Englishman's ouse is his Castle, and
castles must not be busted 'cept when done in war time. And wotsume'er
the failings on his part, he were a corn and seedsman in his hart."

"Is it Pumblechook's house that has been broken into, then?"

"That's it, Pip," said Joe; "and they took his till, and they took his
cash-box, and they drinked his wine, and they partook of his wittles,
and they slapped his face, and they pulled his nose, and they tied him
up to his bedpust, and they giv' him a dozen, and they stuffed his
mouth full of flowering annuals to prewent his crying out. But he knowed
Orlick, and Orlick's in the county jail."

By these approaches we arrived at unrestricted conversation. I was slow
to gain strength, but I did slowly and surely become less weak, and Joe
stayed with me, and I fancied I was little Pip again.

For the tenderness of Joe was so beautifully proportioned to my need,
that I was like a child in his hands. He would sit and talk to me in the
old confidence, and with the old simplicity, and in the old unassertive
protecting way, so that I would half believe that all my life since the
days of the old kitchen was one of the mental troubles of the fever that
was gone. He did everything for me except the household work, for which
he had engaged a very decent woman, after paying off the laundress on
his first arrival. "Which I do assure you, Pip," he would often say, in
explanation of that liberty; "I found her a tapping the spare bed, like
a cask of beer, and dra