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raised the latch of the door and peeped in at him opposite to it, sitting in the chimney corner. "Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you, Pip. And shes out now, making it a bakers dozen." "Is she?" "Yes, Pip," said Joe; "and whats worse, shes got Tickler with her." At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only button on my waistcoat round and round, and looked in great depression at the fire. Tickler was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled frame. "She sot down," said Joe, "and she got up, and she made a grab at Tickler, and she Ram-paged out. Thats what she did," said Joe, slowly clearing the fire between the lower bars with the poker, and looking at it: "she Ram-paged out, Pip." "Has she been gone long, Joe?" I always treated him as a larger species of child, and as no more than my equal. "Well," said Joe, glancing up at the Dutch clock, "shes been on the Ram-page, this last spell, about five minutes, Pip. Shes a coming! Get behind the door, old chap, and have the jack-towel betwixt you." I took the advice. My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing the door wide open, and finding an obstruction behind it, immediately divined the cause, and applied Tickler to its further investigation. She concluded by throwing me--I often served as a connubial missile--at Joe, who, glad to get hold of me on any terms, passed me on into the chimney and quietly fenced me up there with his great leg. "Where have you been, you young monkey?" said Mrs. Joe, stamping her foot. "Tell me directly what youve been doing to wear me away with fret and fright and worrit, or Id have you out of that corner if you was fifty Pips, and he was five hundred Gargerys." "I have only been to the churchyard," said I, from my stool, crying and rubbing myself. "Churchyard!" repeated my sister. "If it warnt for me youd have been to the churchyard long ago, and stayed there. Who brought you up by hand?" "You did," said I. "And why did I do it, I should like to know?" exclaimed my sister. I whimpered, "I dont know." " I dont!" said my sister. "Id never do it again! I know that. I may truly say Ive never had this apron of mine off, since born you were. Its bad enough to be a blacksmiths wife, and him a Gargery, without being your mother." My thoughts strayed from that question as I looked disconsolately at the fire. For, the fugitive out on the marshes with the ironed leg, the mysterious young man, the file, the food, and the dreadful pledge I was under to commit a larceny on those sheltering premises, rose before me in the avenging coals. "Hah!" said Mrs. Joe, restoring Tickler to his station. "Churchyard, indeed! You may well say churchyard, you two." One of us, by-the-bye, had not said it at all. "Youll drive me to the churchyard betwixt you, one of these days, and oh, a pr-r-recious pair youd be without me!" As she applied herself to set the tea-things, Joe peeped down at me over his leg, as if he were mentally casting me and himself up, and calculating what kind of pair we practically should make, under the grievous circumstances foreshadowed. After that, he sat feeling his right-side flaxen curls and whisker, and following Mrs. Joe about with his blue eye, as his manner always was at squally times. My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread-and-butter for us, that never varied. First, with her left hand she jammed the loaf hard and fast against her bib--where it sometimes got a pin into it, and sometimes a needle, which we afterwards got into our mouths. Then she took some butter (not too much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in an apothecarykind of way, as if she were making a plaister--using both sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity, and trimming and moulding the butter off round the crust. Then, she gave the knife a final smart wipe on the edge of the plaister, and then sawed a very thick round off the loaf: which she finally, before separating from the loaf, hewed into two halves, of which Joe got one, and I the other. On the present occasion, though I was hungry, I dared not eat my slice. I felt that I must have something in reserve for my dreadful acquaintance, and his ally the still more dreadful young man. I knew Mrs. Joes housekeeping to be of the strictest kind, and that my larcenous researches might find nothing, available in the safe. Therefore I resolved to put my hunk of bread-and-butter down the leg of my trousers. The effort of resolution necessary to the achievement of this purpose, I found to be quite awful. It was as if I had to make up my mind to leap from the top of a high house, or plunge into a great depth of water. And it was made the more difficult by the unconscious Joe. In our already-mentioned freemasonry as fellow-sufferers, and in his good-natured companionship with me, it was our evening habit to compare the way we bit through our slices, by silently holding them up to each others admiration now and then--which stimulated us to new exerti