Peggotty--made such impressive
motions to me not to ask any more questions, that I could only sit and
look at all the company, until it was time to go to bed.

Mrs. Gummidge lived with them too, and did the cooking and cleaning, for
she was a poor widow and had no home of her own. I thought Mr. Peggotty
was very good to take all these people to live with him, and I was quite
right, for Mr. Peggotty was only a poor man himself and had to work hard
to get a living.

Almost as soon as morning shone upon the oyster-shell frame of my mirror
I was out of bed, and out with tittle Em'ly, picking up stones upon the
beach.

"You're quite a sailor I suppose?" I said to Em'ly. I don't know that I
supposed anything of the kind, but I felt it proper to say something;
and a shining sail close to us made such a pretty little image of
itself, at the moment, in her bright eye, that it came into my head to
say this.

"No," replied Em'ly, shaking her head, "I'm afraid of the sea."

"Afraid!" I said, with a becoming air of boldness, and looking very big
at the mighty ocean. "I ain't."

"Ah! but it's cruel," said Em'ly. "I have seen it very cruel to some of
our men. I have seen it tear a boat as big as our house all to pieces."

"I hope it wasn't the boat that--"

"That father was drowned in?" said Em'ly. "No. Not that one, I never see
that boat."

"Nor him?" I asked her.

Little Em'ly shook her head. "Not to remember!"

Here was something remarkable. I immediately went into an explanation
how I had never seen my own father; and how my mother and I had always
lived by ourselves in the happiest state imaginable, and lived so then,
and always meant to live so; and how my father's grave was in the
churchyard near our house, and shaded by a tree, beneath the boughs of
which I had walked and heard the birds sing many a pleasant morning. But
there were some differences between Em'ly's orphanhood and mine, it
appeared. She had lost her mother before her father, and where her
father's grave was no one knew, except that it was somewhere in the
depths of the sea.

"Besides," said Em'ly, as she looked about for shells and pebbles, "your
father was a gentleman and your mother is a lady; and my father was a
fisherman and my mother was a fisherman's daughter, and my Uncle Dan is
a fisherman."

"Dan is Mr. Peggotty, is he?" said I.

[Illustration: David Copperfield and Little Em'ly.

Page 131]

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