 with it, put it on bent, walked
out, and never came back. She vanished like a discontented fairy; or like one of
those supernatural beings whom it was popularly supposed I was entitled to see:
and never came back any more.
    No. I lay in my basket, and my mother lay in her bed; but Betsey Trotwood
Copperfield was for ever in the land of dreams and shadows, the tremendous
region whence I had so lately travelled; and the light upon the window of our
room shone out upon the earthly bourne of all such travellers, and the mound
above the ashes and the dust that once was he, without whom I had never been.
 

                                   Chapter II

                                   I Observe.

The first objects that assume a distinct presence before me, as I look far back,
into the blank of my infancy, are my mother with her pretty hair and youthful
shape, and Peggotty, with no shape at all, and eyes so dark that they seemed to
darken their whole neighbourhood in her face, and cheeks and arms so hard and
red that I wondered the birds didn't peck her in preference to apples.
    I believe I can remember these two at a little distance apart, dwarfed to my
sight by stooping down or kneeling on the floor, and I going unsteadily from the
one to the other. I have an impression on my mind which I cannot distinguish
from actual remembrance, of the touch of Peggotty's forefinger as she used to
hold it out to me, and of its being roughened by needlework, like a pocket
nutmeg-grater.
    This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go farther
back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of
observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its
closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable
in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the
faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men
to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased,
which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood.
    I might have a misgiving that I am meandering in stopping to say this, but
that it brings me to remark that I build these conclusions, in part upon my own
experience of myself; and if it should appear from anything I may set down in
this narrative that I was a child of close observation, or that as a man I have
a strong memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly
