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and, ‘Oh, indeed, Master Copperfield, I should think you
would, certainly!’ over and over again. Being, at last, ready
to leave the office for the night, he asked me if it would suit
my convenience to have the light put out; and on my an-
swering ‘Yes,’ instantly extinguished it. After shaking hands
with me - his hand felt like a fish, in the dark - he opened
the door into the street a very little, and crept out, and shut
it, leaving me to grope my way back into the house: which
cost me some trouble and a fall over his stool. This was the
proximate cause, I suppose, of my dreaming about him, for
what appeared to me to be half the night; and dreaming,
among other things, that he had launched Mr. Peggotty’s
house on a piratical expedition, with a black flag at the
masthead, bearing the inscription ‘Tidd’s Practice’, under
which diabolical ensign he was carrying me and little Em’ly
to the Spanish Main, to be drowned.
I got a little the better of my uneasiness when I went to
school next day, and a good deal the better next day, and so
shook it off by degrees, that in less than a fortnight I was
quite at home, and happy, among my new companions. I
was awkward enough in their games, and backward enough
in their studies; but custom would improve me in the first
respect, I hoped, and hard work in the second. Accordingly,
I went to work very hard, both in play and in earnest, and
gained great commendation. And, in a very little while, the
Murdstone and Grinby life became so strange to me that I
hardly believed in it, while my present life grew so familiar,
that I seemed to have been leading it a long time.
Doctor Strong’s was an excellent school; as different

David Copperfield