or eleven years, I had not seen Joe nor Biddy with my bodily eyes, — though they had both been often before my fancy in the East, — when, upon an evening in December, an hour or two after dark, I laid my hand softly on the latch of the old kitchen door.

I touched it so softly that I was not heard, and looked in unseen. There, smoking his pipe in the old place by the kitchen firelight, as hale and as strong as ever, though a little gray, sat Joe; and there, fenced into the corner with Joe's leg, and sitting on my own little stool looking at the fire, was — I again!

“We giv' him the name of Pip for your sake, dear old chap,” said Joe, delighted, when I took another stool by the child's side (but I did not rumple his hair), “and we hoped he might grow a