name, my love, is Harris, Mrs. Harris through the square and up the steps a turnin round by the tobacker shop, 'Oh Sairey, Sairey, little do we know wot lays afore us!' 'Mrs. Harris ma'am,' I says, 'not much, it's true, but more than you suppoge. Our calcilations ma'am,' I says, 'respectin wot the number of a family will be, comes most times within one, and oftener than you would suppoge, exact.' 'Sairey,' says Mrs. Harris, in a awful way, 'Tell me wot is my individgle number.' 'No, Mrs. Harris,' I says to her, 'ex-cuge me, if you please. My own,' I says, 'has fallen out of three-pair backs, and had damp doorsteps settled on their lungs, and one was turned up smilin in a bedstead, unbeknown. Therefore, ma'am,' I says, 'seek not to proticipate, but take 'em as they come and as they go.' Mine," said Mrs. Gamp, "mine is all gone, my dear young chick. And as to husbands, there's a wooden leg gone likeways home to its account, which in its constancy of walkin into wine vaults, and never comin out again 'till fetched by force, was quite as weak as flesh, if not weaker."
When she had delivered this oration, Mrs. Gamp leaned her chin upon the cool iron again; and looking intently at the Antwerp packet, shook her head and groaned.
"I wouldn't" said Mrs. Gamp, "I wouldn't be a man and have such a think upon my mind!—but nobody as owned the name of man, could do it!"
Tom and his sister glanced at each other; and Ruth, after a moment's hesitation, asked Mrs. Gamp what troubled her so much.
"My dear," returned that lady, dropping her voice, "you are single, a'n't you?"
Ruth laughed, blushed, and said "Yes."
"Worse luck," proceeded Mrs. Gamp, "for all parties! But others is married, and in the marriage state; and there is a dear young creetur a comin' down this mornin' to that very package, which is no more fit to trust herself to sea, than nothin' is!"
She paused here, to look all over the deck of the packet in question, and on the steps leading down to it, and on the gangways. Seeming to have thus assured herself that the object of her commiseration had not yet arrived, she raised her eyes gradually up to the top of the escape-pipe, and indignantly apostrophised the vessel:
"Oh drat you!" said Mrs. Gamp, shaking her umbrella at it, "you 're a nice spluttering noisy monster for a delicate young creetur to go and be a passinger by; a'n't you! You never do no harm in that way, do you? With your hammering, and roaring, and hissing, and lamp-iling, you brute! Them Confusion steamers," said Mrs. Gamp, shaking her umbrella again, "has done more to throw us out of our reg'lar work and bring ewents on at times when nobody counted on 'em (especially them screeching railroad ones), than all the other frights that ever was took. I have heerd of one young man, a guard upon a railway, only three year opened—well does Mrs. Harris know him, which indeed he is her own relation by her sister's marriage with a master sawyer—as is godfather at this present time to six-and-twenty blessed little strangers, equally unexpected, and all on 'um named after the Ingeins as was the cause. Ugh!" said Mrs. Gamp, resuming her apostrophe, "one might easy know you was a man's invention, from your disregardlessness of the weakness of our naturs, so one might, you brute!"
