!' said Mrs Gamp, shaking her umbrella at it, 'you're a
nice spluttering nisy monster for a delicate young creetur to go and
be a passinger by; ain't you! YOU never do no harm in that way, do
you? With your hammering, and roaring, and hissing, and lamp-iling, you
brute! Them Confugion steamers,' said Mrs Gamp, shaking her umbrella
again, 'has done more to throw us out of our reg'lar work and bring
ewents on at times when nobody counted on 'em (especially them
screeching railroad ones), than all the other frights that ever was
took. I have heerd of one young man, a guard upon a railway, only three
years opened--well does Mrs Harris know him, which indeed he is her own
relation by her sister's marriage with a master sawyer--as is godfather
at this present time to six-and-twenty blessed little strangers, equally
unexpected, and all on 'um named after the Ingeines as was the cause.
Ugh!' said Mrs Gamp, resuming her apostrophe, 'one might easy know you
was a man's inwention, from your disregardlessness of the weakness of
our naturs, so one might, you brute!'

It would not have been unnatural to suppose, from the first part of Mrs
Gamp's lamentations, that she was connected with the stage-coaching or
post-horsing trade. She had no means of judging of the effect of her
concluding remarks upon her young companion; for she interrupted herself
at this point, and exclaimed:

'There she identically goes! Poor sweet young creetur, there she goes,
like a lamb to the sacrifige! If there's any illness when that wessel
gets to sea,' said Mrs Gamp, prophetically, 'it's murder, and I'm the
witness for the persecution.'

She was so very earnest on the subject, that Tom's sister (being as kind
as Tom himself) could not help saying something to her in reply.

'Pray, which is the lady,' she inquired, 'in whom you are so much
interested?'

'There!' groaned Mrs Gamp. 'There she goes! A-crossin' the little wooden
bridge at this minute. She's a-slippin' on a bit of orangepeel!' tightly
clutching her umbrella. 'What a turn it give me.'

'Do you mean the lady who is with that man wrapped up from head to foot
in a large cloak, so that his face is almost hidden?'

'Well he may hide it!' Mrs Gamp replied. 'He's good call to be ashamed
of himself. Did you see him a-jerking of her wrist, then?'

'He seems to be hasty with her, indeed.'

'Now he's a-taking of her down into the close cabin!' said Mrs Gamp,
impatiently. 'What's the man about! The