seed text:
length: 100
temperature: 0.5
Loading Model
Chapter I.
My father’s 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 father’s family name, on the authority of his
tombstone and my sister,—Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith.
As 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 father’s, gave me an 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, exceedingly early 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 a time I found out
for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the
churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late 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 dikes 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.