“Once,” returned Joe. “Not that we wanted to take them, you understand; we went out as lookers on; me, and Mr. Wopsle, and Pip. Didn’t us, Pip?”
“Yes, Joe.”
The stranger looked at me again,—still cocking his eye, as if he were expressly taking aim at me with his invisible gun,—and said, “He’s a likely young parcel of bones that. What is it you call him?”
“Pip,” said Joe.
“Christened Pip?”
“No, not christened Pip.”
“Surname Pip?”
“No,” said Joe, “it’s a kind of family name what he gave himself when a infant, and is called by.”
“Son of yours?”
“Well,” said Joe, meditatively, not, of course, that it could be in anywise necessary to consider about it, but because it was the way at the Jolly Bargemen to seem to consider deeply about everything that was discussed over pipes,—“well—no. No, he ain’t.”