ul ghost!'

'I was obliged to announce myself, somehow,' I replied. 'Have I called
you down from the stars?'

'No,' he answered. 'No.'

'Up from anywhere, then?' said I, taking my seat near him.

'I was looking at the pictures in the fire,' he returned.

'But you are spoiling them for me,' said I, as he stirred it quickly
with a piece of burning wood, striking out of it a train of red-hot
sparks that went careering up the little chimney, and roaring out into
the air.

'You would not have seen them,' he returned. 'I detest this mongrel
time, neither day nor night. How late you are! Where have you been?'

'I have been taking leave of my usual walk,' said I.

'And I have been sitting here,' said Steerforth, glancing round the
room, 'thinking that all the people we found so glad on the night of
our coming down, might--to judge from the present wasted air of the
place--be dispersed, or dead, or come to I don't know what harm. David,
I wish to God I had had a judicious father these last twenty years!'

'My dear Steerforth, what is the matter?'

'I wish with all my soul I had been better guided!' he exclaimed. 'I
wish with all my soul I could guide myself better!'

There was a passionate dejection in his manner that quite amazed me. He
was more unlike himself than I could have supposed possible.

'It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of a nephew,'
he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the chimney-piece, with
his face towards the fire, 'than to be myself, twenty times richer and
twenty times wiser, and be the torment to myself that I have been, in
this Devil's bark of a boat, within the last half-hour!'

I was so confounded by the alteration in him, that at first I could only
observe him in silence, as he stood leaning his head upon his hand, and
looking gloomily down at the fire. At length I begged him, with all
the earnestness I felt, to tell me what had occurred to cross him so
unusually, and to let me sympathize with him, if I could not hope to
advise him. Before I had well concluded, he began to laugh--fretfully at
first, but soon with returning gaiety.

'Tut, it's nothing, Daisy! nothing!' he replied. 'I told you at the
inn in London, I am heavy company for myself, sometimes. I have been a
nightmare to myself, just now--must have had one, I think. At odd dull
times, nursery tales come up into the memory, unrecognized for what
they are. I believe I have been confounding myself