the occasion of his
attaching an uncommon and delightful interest to the adventure of
Florence with Good Mrs Brown. He pampered and cherished it in his
memory, especially that part of it with which he had been associated:
until it became the spoiled child of his fancy, and took its own way,
and did what it liked with it.

The recollection of those incidents, and his own share in them, may have
been made the more captivating, perhaps, by the weekly dreamings of
old Sol and Captain Cuttle on Sundays. Hardly a Sunday passed, without
mysterious references being made by one or other of those worthy chums
to Richard Whittington; and the latter gentleman had even gone so far as
to purchase a ballad of considerable antiquity, that had long fluttered
among many others, chiefly expressive of maritime sentiments, on a dead
wall in the Commercial Road: which poetical performance set forth the
courtship and nuptials of a promising young coal-whipper with a certain
'lovely Peg,' the accomplished daughter of the master and part-owner of
a Newcastle collier. In this stirring legend, Captain Cuttle descried a
profound metaphysical bearing on the case of Walter and Florence; and it
excited him so much, that on very festive occasions, as birthdays and a
few other non-Dominical holidays, he would roar through the whole song
in the little back parlour; making an amazing shake on the word Pe-e-eg,
with which every verse concluded, in compliment to the heroine of the
piece.

But a frank, free-spirited, open-hearted boy, is not much given to
analysing the nature of his own feelings, however strong their hold upon
him: and Walter would have found it difficult to decide this point. He
had a great affection for the wharf where he had encountered Florence,
and for the streets (albeit not enchanting in themselves) by which they
had come home. The shoes that had so often tumbled off by the way, he
preserved in his own room; and, sitting in the little back parlour of
an evening, he had drawn a whole gallery of fancy portraits of Good Mrs
Brown. It may be that he became a little smarter in his dress after that
memorable occasion; and he certainly liked in his leisure time to walk
towards that quarter of the town where Mr Dombey's house was situated,
on the vague chance of passing little Florence in the street. But the
sentiment of all this was as boyish and innocent as could be. Florence
was very pretty, and it is pleasant to admire a pretty face. Fl