you see your opening. And you go in, and you swoop upon it, and
you make your capital, and then there you are! When you have once made
your capital you have nothing to do but employ it." In like manner Pip
tells us "Suppose your debts to be one hundred and sixty four pounds
four and two-pence, I would say, leave a margin and put them down at two
hundred; or suppose them to be four times as much, leave a margin and
put them down at seven hundred." He is sufficiently candid to add, that,
while he has the highest opinion of the wisdom and prudence of the
margin, its dangers are that in the sense of freedom and solvency it
imparts there is a tendency to run into new debt. But the satire that
thus enforces the old warning against living upon vague hopes, and
paying ancient debts by contracting new ones, never presented itself in
more amusing or kindly shape. A word should be added of the father of
the girl that Herbert marries, Bill Barley, ex-ship's purser, a gouty,
bed-ridden, drunken old rascal, who lies on his back in an upper floor
on Mill Pond Bank by Chinks's Basin, where he keeps, weighs, and serves
out the family stores or provisions, according to old professional
practice, with one eye at a telescope which is fitted on his bed for the
convenience of sweeping the river. This is one of those sketches, slight
in itself but made rich with a wealth of comic observation, in which
Dickens's humour took especial delight; and to all this part of the
story, there is a quaint riverside flavour that gives it amusing reality
and relish.

Sending the chapters that contain it, which open the third division of
the tale, he wrote thus: "It is a pity that the third portion cannot be
read all at once, because its purpose would be much more apparent; and
the pity is the greater, because the general turn and tone of the
working out and winding up, will be away from all such things as they
conventionally go. But what must be, must be. As to the planning out
from week to week, nobody can imagine what the difficulty is, without
trying. But, as in all such cases, when it is overcome the pleasure is
proportionate. Two months more will see me through it, I trust. All the
iron is in the fire, and I have 'only' to beat it out." One other letter
throws light upon an objection taken not unfairly to the too great speed
with which the heroine, after being married, reclaimed, and widowed, is
in a page or two again made love to, and remarried by the