How did I know it?
Much as I know'd the birds' names in the hedges to be chaffinch, sparrer, thrush.

I might have thought it was all lies together, only as the birds' names come out true, I supposed mine did.
"So fur as I could find, there warn't a soul that see young Abel Magwitch, with us little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at him, and either drove him off, or took him up.

I was took up, took up, took up, to that extent that I reg'larly grow'd up took up.
"This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little creetur as much to be pitied as ever I see (not that I looked in the glass, for there warn't many insides of furnished houses known to me), I got the name of being hardened.

'This is a terrible hardened one,' they says to prison wisitors, picking out me.

'May be said to live in jails, this boy.' Then they looked at me, and I looked at them, and they measured my head, some on 'em,--they had better a measured my stomach,--and others on 'em giv me tracts what I couldn't read, and made me speeches what I couldn't understand.