 the basket, her hold of which never relaxed; and I could not
have believed unless I had heard her do it, that one defenceless woman could
have snored so much.
    We made so many deviations up and down lanes, and were such a long time
delivering a bedstead at a public-house, and calling at other places, that I was
quite tired, and very glad, when we saw Yarmouth. It looked rather spongy and
soppy, I thought, as I carried my eye over the great dull waste that lay across
the river; and I could not help wondering, if the world were really as round as
my geography-book said, how any part of it came to be so flat. But I reflected
that Yarmouth might be situated at one of the poles; which would account for it.
    As we drew a little nearer, and saw the whole adjacent prospect lying a
straight low line under the sky, I hinted to Peggotty that a mound or so might
have improved it; and also that if the land had been a little more separated
from the sea, and the town and the tide had not been quite so much mixed up,
like toast and water, it would have been nicer. But Peggotty said, with greater
emphasis than usual, that we must take things as we found them, and that, for
her part, she was proud to call herself a Yarmouth Bloater.
    When we got into the street (which was strange enough to me), and smelt the
fish, and pitch, and oakum, and tar, and saw the sailors walking about, and the
carts jingling up and down over the stones, I felt that I had done so busy a
place an injustice; and said as much to Peggotty, who heard my expressions of
delight with great complacency, and told me it was well known (I suppose to
those who had the good fortune to be born Bloaters) that Yarmouth was, upon the
whole, the finest place in the universe.
    »Here's my Am!« screamed Peggotty, »growed out of knowledge!«
    He was waiting for us, in fact, at the public-house; and asked me how I
found myself, like an old acquaintance. I did not feel, at first, that I knew
him as well as he knew me, because he had never come to our house since the
night I was born, and naturally he had the advantage of me. But our intimacy was
much advanced by his taking me on his back to carry me home. He was, now, a
