1 I was disappointed to find that the day was a holiday; no children were there, and Biddy's house was closed.
2 Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it.
3 Lifting the latch of a gate, we passed direct into a little garden overlooking the river, where Mr. Pocket's children were playing about.
4 Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction.
5 In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.
6 It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and their not being anybody else's business.
7 Mrs. Pocket was sitting on a garden chair under a tree, reading, with her legs upon another garden chair; and Mrs. Pocket's two nurse-maids were looking about them while the children played.
8 Dear Joe, I hope you will have children to love, and that some little fellow will sit in this chimney-corner of a winter night, who may remind you of another little fellow gone out of it for ever.
9 Mr. Pocket was out lecturing; for, he was a most delightful lecturer on domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of children and servants were considered the very best text-books on those themes.
10 And unless I deceive myself on a point where my interests or prepossessions are certainly not concerned, I saw that Mr. and Mrs. Pocket's children were not growing up or being brought up, but were tumbling up.
11 Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged.
12 They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to make of them.
13 In some of her looks and gestures there was that tinge of resemblance to Miss Havisham which may often be noticed to have been acquired by children, from grown person with whom they have been much associated and secluded, and which, when childhood is passed, will produce a remarkable occasional likeness of expression between faces that are otherwise quite different.