fête days festival days or days with gala parties held outdoors.
he knew where I was to be found Pip is so upset when Drummle toasts Estella at a meeting of the Finches and tells everyone he is acquainted with her, that Pip challenges him to a duel. The Finches arrange a bloodless way to resolve the fight with Drummle producing a certificate from the lady proving his acquaintance and Pip apologizing when he does.
In the Eastern story . . . the ceiling fell from a book Dickens read as a boy, Tales of the Genii, with stories similar to the Arabian Nights. The sixth tale in this book has the wise vizier for the sultan foiling the sultan's enemies with an elaborate trap like the one mentioned here. A stone crushes the enemies as they sleep. The point is that the enemies thought they were at the peak of their power having trapped the sultan, and suddenly their luck ran out. The same is about to happen to Pip.
"It's death to come back." These words spoken by the convict to Pip set the main danger and conflict for the rest of the novel. However, the direness of the convict's situation was most likely nowhere near as bad as Dickens makes it out to be in the book. The last time someone hanged for returning to England after being banished was in 1810. From 1827–1830, out of eight returned convicted transports, none was executed. By 1834, the death penalty for illegal reentry had been taken off the statute books.
