"Fox's sleep, Stevy?" he said, with his hand under my chin. "Well, boy, I was thinking about you. I was thinking it's a good job your father's coming home soon, Stevy; though I don't like parting with you." Parting with me? I did not understand. Wouldn't father be going away again soon? "Well, I dunno, Stevy, I dunno. I've been thinking a lot just lately, that's a fact. This place is good enough for me, but it ain't a good place to bring up a boy like you in; not to make him the man I want you to be, Stevy. Somehow it didn't strike me that way at first, though it ought to ha' done. It ought to ha' done, seein' it struck strangers--an' not particular moral strangers at that." He was thinking of Blind George and Mrs. Grimes. Though at the moment I wondered if his talk with Mr. Viney had set him doubting. "No, Stevy," he resumed, "it ain't giving you a proper chance, keeping you here. You can't get lavender water out o' the bilge, an' this part's the bilge of all London. I want you to be a better man than me, Stevy." I could not imagine anybody being a better man than Grandfather Nat, and the prospect of leaving him oppressed me dismally. And where was I to go? I remembered the terrible group of aunts at my mother's funeral, and a shadowy fear that I might be transferred to one of those virtuous females--perhaps to Aunt Martha--put a weight on my heart. "Don't send me away, Gran'fa Nat!" I pleaded, with something pulling at the corners of my mouth; "I haven't been a bad boy yet, have I?" He caught me up and sat me on his fore-arm, so that my face almost touched his, and I could see my little white reflection in his eyes. "You're the best boy in England, Stevy," he said, and kissed me affectionately. "The best boy in the world. An' I wouldn't let go o' you for a minute but for your own good. But see now, Stevy, see; as to goin' away, now. You'll have to go to school, my boy, won't you? An' the best school we can manage--a gentleman's school; boardin' school, you know. Well, that'll mean goin' away, won't it? An' then it wouldn't do for you to go to a school like that, not from here, you know--which you'll understand when you get there, among the others. My boy--my boy an' your father's--has got to be as good a gentleman as any of 'em, an' not looked down on because o' comin' from a Wapping public like this, an' sent by a rough old chap like me. See?" I thought very hard over this view of things, which was difficult to understand. Who should look down on me because of Grandfather Nat, of whom I was so fond and so proud? Grandfather Nat, who had sailed ships all over the world, had seen storms and icebergs and wrecks, and who was treated with so much deference by everybody who came to the Hole in the Wall? Then I thought again of the aunts at the funeral, and remembered how they had tilted their chins at him; and I wondered, with forebodings, if people at a boarding school were like those aunts.