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"He slings his hammock for the present, lady lass," said Captain Cuttle, "round at Brogley's. Within hail, Heart's Delight.'

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"I am the cause of your going away, Walter,” said Florence. "There is a houseless sister in your place." "Dear Miss Dombey," replied Walter, hesitating"if it is not too bold, to call you so!-"

"Walter!" she exclaimed, surprised.

"If anything could make me happier in being allowed to see and speak to you, would it not be the discovery that I had any means on earth of doing you a moment's service? Where would I not go, what would I not do, for your sake?"

She smiled, and called him brother.
"You are so changed," said Walter-
"I changed!" she interrupted.

"To me," said Walter, softly, as if he were thinking aloud, "changed to me. I left you such a child, and find you-oh! something so different—”

"But your sister, Walter. You have not forgottenwhat we promised to each other, when we parted?" "Forgotten!" But he said no more.

"And if you had-if suffering and danger had driven it from your thoughts-which it has not-you would remember it now, Walter, when you find me poor and abandoned, with no home but this, and no friends but the two who hear me speak!"

"I would! Heaven knows I would!" said Walter.

"Oh, Walter," exclaimed Florence, through her sobs and tears. "Dear Brother! Show me some way through the world-some humble path that I may take alone, and labor in, and sometimes think of you as one who will protect and care for me as for a sister! Oh, help me, Walter, for I need help so much!"

"Miss Dombey! Florence! I would die to help you. But your friends are proud and rich. Your father" "No, no! Walter! She shrieked, and put her hands up to her head in an attitude of terror that transfixed him where he stood. "Don't say that word!"

He never from that hour, forgot the voice and look with which she stopped him at the name. He felt that if he were to live a hundred years, he never could forget it.

Somewhere-anywhere-but never home! All past,

all gone, all lost, and broken up! The whole history of her untold slight and suffering was in the cry and look; and he felt he never could forget it, and he never did.

She laid her gentle face upon the captain's shoulder, and related how and why she had fled. If every sorrowing tear she shed in doing so had been a curse upon the head of him she never named or blamed, it would have been better for him, Walter thought with awe, than to be renounced out of such a strength and might of love.

"There, precious!" said the captain, when she ceased; and deep attention the captain had paid to her while she spoke; listening, with his glazed hat all awry, and his mouth wide open. "Awast, awast, my eyes! Wal'r, dear lad, sheer off for to-night, and leave the pretty one to me!"

Walter took her hand in both of his, and put it to his lips and kissed it. He knew now that she was, indeed, a homeless wandering fugitive; but, richer to him so than in all the wealth and pride of her right station, she seemed farther off than even on the height that had made him giddy in his boyish dreams.

Captain Cuttle, perplexed by no such meditations, guarded Florence to her room, and watched at intervals upon the charmed ground outside her door-for such it truly was to him-until he felt sufficiently easy in his mind about her, to turn in under the counter. On abandoning his watch for that purpose, he could not help calling once, rapturously, through the keyhole, "Drownded. An't he, pretty?"-or, when he got downstairs, making another trial at that verse of Lovely Peg. But it stuck in his throat somehow, and he could make nothing of it; so he went to bed, and dreamed that old Sol Gills was married to Mrs. MacStinger, and kept prisoner by that lady in a secret chamber on a short allowance of victuals.

18-11

CHAPTER XX.

MR. TOOTS'S COMPLAINT.

THERE was an empty room above stairs at the Wooden Midshipman's, which, in days of yore, had been Walter's bedroom. Walter, rousing up the captain betimes in the morning, proposed that they should carry thither such furniture out of the little parlor as would grace it best, so that Florence might take possession of it when she rose. As nothing could be more agreeable to Captain Cuttle than making himself very red and short of breath in such a cause, he turned to (as he himself said) with a will; and, in a couple of hours, this garret was transformed into a species of land-cabin, adorned with all the choicest movables out of the parlor, inclusive even of the Tartar frigate, which the captain hung up over the chimney-piece with such extreme delight, that he could do nothing for half-an-hour afterwards but walk backward from it, lost in admiration.

The captain could be induced by no persuasion of Walter's to wind up the big watch, or to take back the canister, or to touch the sugar-tongs and tea-spoons. "No, no, my lad;" was the captain's invariable reply to any solicitation of the kind, "I've made that there little property over, jintly." These words he repeated with great unction and gravity, evidently believing that they had the virtue of an Act of Parliament, and that unless he committed himself by some new admission of ownership, no flaw could be found in such a form of convey

ance.

It was an advantage of the new arrangement, that besides the greater seclusion it afforded Florence, it admitted of the Midshipman being restored to his usual post of observation, and also of the shop shutters being taken down. The latter ceremony, however little importance the unconscious captain attached to it, was not wholly superfluous; for, on the previous day, so much excitement had been occasioned in the neighborhood, by the shutters remaining unopened, that the Instrument-maker's house had been honored with an unusual share of public observation, and had been intently stared at from the opposite side of the way, by

groups of hungry gazers, at any time between sunrise and sunset. The idlers and vagabonds had been particularly interested in the captain's fate; constantly grovelling in the mud to apply their eyes to the cellargrating, under the shop-window, and delighting their imaginations with the fancy that they could see a piece of his coat as he hung in a corner; though this settlement of him was stoutly disputed by an opposite faction, who were of opinion that he lay murdered with a hammer, on the stairs. It was not without exciting some discontent, therefore, that the subject of these rumors was seen early in the morning standing at his shop-door as hale and hearty as if nothing had happened; and the beadle of that quarter, a man of an ambitious character, who had expected to have the distinction of being present at the breaking open of the door, and of giving evidence in full uniform before the coroner, went so far as to say to an opposite neighbor, that the chap in the glazed hat had better not try it on there-without more particularly mentioning what-and further, that he, the beadle, would keep his eye upon him.

"Captain Cuttle," said Walter, musing, when they stood resting from their labors at the shop-door, looking down the old familiar street; it being still early in the mórning; "nothing at all of Uncle Sol, in all that time!" "Nothing at all, my lad," replied the captain, shaking his head.

66

"Gone in search of me, dear, kind old man," said Walter; yet never write to you! But why not? He says, in effect, in this packet that you gave me," taking the paper from his pocket, which had been opened in the presence of the enlightened Bunsby, "that if you never hear from him before opening it, you may believe him dead. Heaven forbid! But you would have heard of him, even if he were dead! Some one would have written, surely, by his desire, if he could not; and have said, 'on such a day, there died in my house,' 'or under my care,' or so forth, Mr. Solomon Gills of London, who left this last remembrance and this last request to you.'

The captain, who had never climbed to such a clear height of probability before, was greatly impressed by the wide prospect it opened, and answered, with a thoughtful shake of his head, "Well said, my lad; wery well said."

"I have been thinking of this or, at least," said Walter, coloring, "I have been thinking of one thing and another, all through a sleepless night, and I cannot believe, Captain Cuttle, but that my Uncle Sol (Lord bless him!) is alive, and will return. I don't so much wonder at his going away, because leaving out of consideration that spice of the marvellous which was always in his character, and his great affection for me, before which every other consideration of his life became nothing, as no one ought to know so well as I who had the best of fathers in him,"-Walter's voice was indistinct and husky here, and he looked away, along the street, "leaving that out of consideration, I say, I have often read and heard of people who, having some near and dear relative, who was supposed to be shipwrecked at sea, have gone down to live on that part of the seashore where any tidings of the missing ship might be expected to arrive, though only an hour or two sooner than elsewhere, or have even gone upon her track to the place whither she was bound, as if their going would create intelligence. I think I should do such a thing myself, as soon as another, or sooner than many, perhaps. But why my uncle shouldn't write to you, when he so clearly intended to do so, or how he should die abroad, and you not know it through some other hand, I cannot make out."

Captain Cuttle observed with a shake of his head, that Jack Bunsby himself hadn't made it out, and that he was a man as could give a pretty taut opinion too.

"If my uncle had been a heedless young man, likely to be entrapped by jovial company to some drinkingplace, where he was to be got rid of for the sake of what money he might have about him," said Walter; "or if he had been a reckless sailor, going ashore with two or three months' pay in his pocket, I could understand his disappearing, and leaving no trace behind. But, being what he was-and is, I hope-I can't believe it."

"Wal'r, my lad," inquired the captain, wistfully eyeing him as he pondered and pondered, "what do you make of it, then?"

"Captain Cuttle," returned Walter, "I don't know what to make of it. I suppose he never has written! There is no doubt about that?"

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