if the spot awakened thoughts of death! It would be no pain to
sleep amid such sights and sounds as these. For the time was drawing
nearer every day when Nell was to rest indeed. She never murmured or
complained, but faded like a light upon a summer's evening and died. Day
after day and all day long, the old man, broken-hearted and with no love
or care for anything in life, would sit beside her grave with her straw
hat and the little basket she had been used to carry, waiting till she
should come to him again. At last they found him lying dead upon the
stone. And in the church where they had often prayed and mused and
lingered, hand in hand, the child and the old man slept together.

FOOTNOTE:

[C] The Lord Chancellor, it may be explained, is the highest judge in
the courts of England; and when in court always wears a great wig and a
robe.

VII.

LITTLE DAVID COPPERFIELD.

I, little David Copperfield, lived with my mother in a pretty house in
the village of Blunderstone in Suffolk. I had never known my father, who
died before I could remember anything, and I had neither brothers nor
sisters. I was fondly loved by my pretty young mother, and our kind,
good servant, Peggotty, and was a very happy little fellow. We had very
few friends, and the only relation my mother talked about was an aunt of
my father's, a tall and rather terrible old lady, from all accounts, who
had once been to see us when I was quite a tiny baby, and had been so
angry to find I was not a little girl that she had left the house quite
offended, and had never been heard of since. One visitor, a tall dark
gentleman, I did not like at all, and was rather inclined to be jealous
that my mother should be so friendly with the stranger.

Peggotty and I were sitting one night by the parlor fire, alone. I had
been reading to Peggotty about crocodiles. I was tired of reading, and
dead sleepy; but having leave, as a high treat, to sit up until my
mother came home from spending the evening at a neighbor's, I would
rather have died upon my post (of course) than have gone to bed. I had
reached that stage of sleepiness when Peggotty seemed to swell and grow
immensely large. I propped my eyelids open with my two forefingers, and
looked perseveringly at her as she sat at work; at the little house with
a thatched roof, where she kept her yard-measure; at her work-box with a
sliding-lid, with a view of St. Paul's Cathedral (with a pink dome)
painted on th