seemed quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its
being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught
way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his
own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked
with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious con-
traction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, ' Belin-
da, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?' And she looked up from
her book, and said, 'Yes.' She then smiled upon me in an absent
state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower
water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any
foregone or subsequent transaction, I considered it to have been
thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational
condescension.

I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that
Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental
deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that
his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for some-
body's determined opposition arising out of entirely personal mo-
tives--I forget whose, if I ever knew--the Sovereign's, the Prime
Minister's, the Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's,
anybody's--and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth
in right of this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been
knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point
of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the oc-
casion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and
for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar.
Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up
from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a
title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian
domestic knowledge.

So successful a watch and ward had been established over the
young lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up high-
ly ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her char-
acter thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had
encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first bloom of youth,
and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to
roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was

-180-