David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Chapter 21 Page 59

pleasant and light-hearted. He got Mr. Peggotty to sing, or rather to roar, ‘When the stormy winds do blow, do blow, do blow’; and he sang a sailor’s song himself, so pathetically and beautifully, that I could have almost fancied that the real wind creeping sorrowfully round the house, and murmuring low through our unbroken silence, was there to listen.

As to Mrs. Gummidge, he roused that victim of despondency with a success never attained by anyone else (so Mr. Peggotty informed me), since the decease of the old one. He left her so little leisure for being miserable, that she said next day she thought she must have been bewitched.

But he set up no monopoly of the general attention, or the conversation. When little Em’ly grew more courageous, and talked