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Answer to Cryptogram 2
My
fathers family name being Pirrip and my Christian name Philip,
my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or
more explicit than Pip. So I called myself Pip and came
to be called Pip.
I
give Pirrip as my fathers family name on the authority of his
tombstone and my sister's Mrs Joe Gargery, who married the
blacksmith. I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw
any likeness of either of them, for their days were long
before the days of photographs.
My
first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably
derived from their tombstones - the shape of the letters on my
fathers gave me the odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark
man with curly black hair from the character and turn of the
inscription. Also Georgiana, wife of the above. I drew a
childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly to
five little stone lozenges each about a foot and a half long
which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave and were
sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine who gave
up trying to get a living, exceeding yearly in that universal
struggle. I am
indebted for a belief I religiously entertained, that they had
all been born on their backs with their hands in their
trousers pockets and had never taken them out in this state of
existence.
Ours
was the marsh country down by the river within. As the river
wound twenty miles of the sea my first most vivid and broad
impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been
gained on a memorable raw afternoon. Towards evening at such
at time I found out for certain that this bleak place
overgrown with nettles was the churchyard and that Phillip
Pirrip of this parish and also Georgiana, wife of the above,
were dead and buried and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham,
Tobias and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid were also
dead and buried.
And
that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard
intersected with
dykes and mounds and
gates with scattered cattle feeding on it was the
marshes, and that the low leaden line beyond was the river
,and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was
rushing was the sea, and that the small bundle of shivers
growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry was
Pip. |