Mr. Peggotty burst into a great roar of laughter, and Agnes and I both kept him company.
“But I must say this, for the good creetur,” he resumed, wiping his face when we were quite exhausted; “she has been all she said she’d be to us, and more. She’s the willingest, the trewest, the honestest-helping woman, Mas’r Davy, as ever draw’d the breath of life. I have never know’d her to be lone and lorn, for a single minute, not even when the colony was all afore us, and we was new to it. And thinking of the old ’un is a thing she never done, I do assure you, since she left England!”
“Now, last, not least, Mr. Micawber,” said I. “He has paid off every obligation he incurred here—even to Traddles’s bill, you remember, my dear Agnes—and therefore we may take it for granted that he is doing well. But what is the latest news of him?”
Mr. Peggotty, with a smile, put his hand in his breast-pocket, and produced a flat-folded, paper parcel, from which he took out, with much care, a little odd-looking newspaper.
“You are to unnerstan’, Mas’r Davy,” said he, “as we have left the Bush now, being so well to do; and have gone right away round to Port Middlebay Harbor, wheer theer’s what we call a town.”
“Mr. Micawber was in the Bush near you?” said I.
“Bless you, yes,” said Mr. Peggotty, “and turned to with a will. I never wish to meet a better gen’lman for turning to, with a will. I’ve seen that theer bald head of his, a perspiring in the sun, Mas’r Davy,
’till I a’most thowt it would have melted away. And now he’s a Magistrate.”
“A Magistrate, eh?” said I.
Mr. Peggotty pointed to a certain paragraph in the newspaper, where I read aloud as follows, from the “Port Middlebay Times:”