'David Copperfield was puzzling, too. He was a 'posthumous child' and was born with a 'caul'. The French dictionary, the only one I had, gave posthumous; posthume, which did not help me much; but for caul it gave fillet, and of course a fillet was a string bag. How very odd. Then someone gave me a present of Esmond; but my mother said I was not to read it, because parts of it were 'not very nice'. Of course I wanted to find out what was not nice about it; so, by a quibble, I decided that I might read all that I could manage without cutting the pages. With industry and perseverance this meant practically all of it, though the pages were not cut for many a long year. But I could never discover what was wrong with it'.