en't so thick, nor my hands so coarse."

Then I told Joe that I felt very miserable, but I hadn't liked to tell
Mrs. Joe and Uncle Pumblechook about the beautiful young lady at Miss
Havisham's who was so proud, and that she had said I was common, and that
I wished I was not common, and that the lies had come out of it somehow,
though I didn't know how.

"Well," said Joe after a good deal of thought, "there's one thing you may
be sure of, Pip, namely, that lies is lies. Howsoever they come, they
didn't ought to come, and they come from the father of lies and work round
to the same. Don't you tell no more of 'em, Pip. They ain't the way to get
out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don't make it out
at all clear. You're sure an uncommon scholar."

This I denied in the face of Joe's most forcible arguments, and at the end
of our talk, I said, "You are not angry with me, Joe?"

"No, old chap, but if you can't get to being uncommon through going
straight, you'll never get to do it through going crooked. So don't tell
no more on 'em, Pip. Don't never do it no more."

When I got up to my little room and said my prayers, I thought over Joe's
advice and knew that it was right, and yet my mind was in such a disturbed
and unthankful state, that for a long time I lay awake, not thinking over
my sins, but still mourning that Joe and Mrs. Joe and I were all common.

That was a memorable day for me, and it wrought great changes in me. I
began to see things and people from a new point of view, and from that day
dates the beginning of my great expectations.

One night, a little later, I was at the village Public House with Joe, who
was smoking his pipe with friends. In the room there was a stranger, who,
when he heard me addressed as Pip, turned and looked at me. He kept
looking hard at me, and nodding at me, and I returned his nods as politely
as possible. Presently, after seeing that Joe was not looking, he nodded
again and then rubbed his leg--in a very odd way, it struck me--and later,
he stirred his rum and water pointedly at me, and he tasted it pointedly
at me. And he did both, not with the spoon but with a file. He did this so
that nobody but I saw the file, and then he wiped it and put it in his
pocket I knew it to be Joe's file, and I knew that he was my convict the
minute I saw the instrument. I sat gazing at him, spell-bound, but he took
very little more notice of me; only when Joe and I started to go,