"He was very well indeed when I came away, Mr. Peggotty."
"There's a friend!" said Mr. Peggotty, stretching out his pipe. "There's a friend, if you talk of friends! Why, Lord love my heart alive, if it ain't a treat to look at him!"
"He is very handsome, is he not?" said I, my heart warming with this praise.
"Handsome!" cried Mr. Peggotty. "He stands up to you like—like a—why, I don't know what he don't stand up to you like. He's so bold!"
"Yes! That's just his character," said I. "He's as brave as a lion, and you can't think how frank he is, Mr. Peggotty."
"And I do suppose, now," said Mr. Peggotty, looking at me through the smoke of his pipe, "that in the way of book-learning he'd take the wind out of a'most anything."
"Yes," said I, delighted; "he knows everything. He is astonishingly clever."
"There's a friend!" murmured Mr. Peggotty, with a grave toss of his head.
"Nothing seems to cost him any trouble," said I. "He knows a task if he only looks at it. He is the best cricketer you ever saw. He will give you almost as many men as you like at draughts, and beat you easily."
Mr. Peggotty gave his head another toss, as much as to say: "Of course he will."
"He is such a speaker," I pursued, "that he can win anybody over; and I don't know what you'd say if you were to hear him sing, Mr. Peggotty."
Mr. Peggotty gave his head another toss, as much as to say: "I have no doubt of it."
"Then, he's such a generous, fine, noble fellow," said I, quite carried away by my favorite theme, "that it's hardly possible to give him as much praise as he deserves. I am sure I can never feel thankful enough for the generosity with which he has protected me, so much younger and lower in the school than himself."
I was running on, very fast indeed, when my eyes rested on little Em'ly's face, which was bent forward over the table, listening with the deepest attention, her breath held, her blue eyes sparkling like jewels, and the color mantling in her cheeks. She looked so extraordinarily earnest and pretty, that I stopped in a sort of wonder; and they all observed her at the same time, for, as I stopped, they laughed and looked at her.
"Em'ly is like me," said Peggotty, "and would like to see him."
Em'ly was confused by our all observing her, and hung down her head, and her face was covered with blushes. Glancing up presently through her stray curls, and seeing that we were all looking at her still (I am sure, I, for one, could have looked at her for hours), she ran away, and kept away till it was nearly bedtime.
I lay down in the old little bed in the stern of the boat, and the wind came moaning on across the flat as it had done before. But I could not help fancying, now, that it moaned of those who were gone; and instead of thinking that the sea might rise in the night and float the boat away, I thought of the sea that had risen, since I last heard those sounds, and drowned my happy home. I recollect, as the wind and water began to
