That is among my very earliest impressions,--that, and a sense that we were both a little afraid of Peggotty, and submit ourselves in most things to her direction.
Peggotty and I were sitting one night by the parlor fire, alone. I had been reading to Peggotty about crocodiles. I must not have read very clearly, for I remember she had a cloudy impression that they were a sort of vegetable. I was tired of reading, and sleepy; but having leave, as a high treat, to sit up until my mother came home from spending the evening at a neighbor's, I would rather have died upon my post than have gone to bed.
We had exhausted the crocodiles, and begun with alligators, when the bell rang. We went out to the door; and there was my mother looking unusually pretty, I thought, and with her a gentleman with beautiful black hair and whiskers, who had walked home with us from church last Sunday.
As my mother stooped down on the threshold to take me in her arms and kiss me, the gentleman said I was a more highly privileged little fellow than a monarch--or something like that.
"What does that mean?" I asked him, over her shoulder.
He patted me on the head; but somehow, I didn't like him or his deep voice, and I was jealous that his hand should touch my mother's in touching me--which it did. I put it away as well as I could. My mother gently chid me for being rude; and, keeping me close to her shawl, turned to thank the gentleman for bringing her home.
From the moment that I first saw the gentleman with the black whiskers, I held a deep instinctive dislike to him. And I am sure Peggotty agreed with me, from some remarks I chanced to hear her utter to my mother. But Mr. Murdstone--that was his name--began coming often to the Rookery, and exerted himself always to be agreeable to me, calling me a fine boy and patting me on the head; so I tried to think myself very ungrateful. But still I could not make myself like him. The sight of him made me fear that something was going to happen--I didn't know what.
Not long after that, when Peggotty and I were sitting alone, she darning and I reading farther in the crocodile book,--for my mother was out, as she often was, with Mr. Murdstone,--she bit off a thread and asked: