not fell down upon my shoulder that unfortunate night.

To cut it short, I spoke confidential to Mim while he was beating the
gong outside betwixt two lots of Pickleson's publics, and I put it to
him, "She lies heavy on your own hands; what'll you take for her?" Mim
was a most ferocious swearer. Suppressing that part of his reply which
was much the longest part, his reply was, "A pair of braces." "Now I'll
tell you," says I, "what I'm a going to do with you. I'm a going to
fetch you half-a-dozen pair of the primest braces in the cart, and then
to take her away with me." Says Mim (again ferocious), "I'll believe it
when I've got the goods, and no sooner." I made all the haste I could,
lest he should think twice of it, and the bargain was completed, which
Pickleson he was thereby so relieved in his mind that he come out at his
little back door, longways like a serpent, and give us Shivery Shakey in
a whisper among the wheels at parting.

It was happy days for both of us when Sophy and me began to travel in the
cart. I at once give her the name of Sophy, to put her ever towards me
in the attitude of my own daughter. We soon made out to begin to
understand one another, through the goodness of the Heavens, when she
knowed that I meant true and kind by her. In a very little time she was
wonderful fond of me. You have no idea what it is to have anybody
wonderful fond of you, unless you have been got down and rolled upon by
the lonely feelings that I have mentioned as having once got the better
of me.

You'd have laughed--or the rewerse--it's according to your disposition--if
you could have seen me trying to teach Sophy. At first I was
helped--you'd never guess by what--milestones. I got some large
alphabets in a box, all the letters separate on bits of bone, and saying