Tom Tiddlers Ground | Page 6

unglazed, Mr. Traveller made bold to peep within the bars. And there to be sure he had a real live Hermit before him, and could judge how the real dead Hermits used to look.
He was lying on a bank of soot and cinders, on the floor, in front of a rusty fireplace. There was nothing else in the dark little kitchen, or scullery, or whatever his den had been originally used as, but a table with a litter of old bottles on it. A rat made a clatter among these bottles, jumped down, and ran over the real live Hermit on his way to his hole, or the man in HIS hole would not have been so easily discernible. Tickled in the face by the rat's tail, the owner of Tom Tiddler's ground opened his eyes, saw Mr. Traveller, started up, and sprang to the window.
"Humph!" thought Mr. Traveller, retiring a pace or two from the bars. "A compound of Newgate, Bedlam, a Debtors' Prison in the worst time, a chimney-sweep, a mudlark, and the Noble Savage! A nice old family, the Hermit family. Hah!"
Mr. Traveller thought this, as he silently confronted the sooty object in the blanket and skewer (in sober truth it wore nothing else), with the matted hair and the staring eyes. Further, Mr. Traveller thought, as the eye surveyed him with a very obvious curiosity in ascertaining the effect they produced, "Vanity, vanity, vanity! Verily, all is vanity!"
"What is your name, sir, and where do you come from?" asked Mr. Mopes the Hermit--with an air of authority, but in the ordinary human speech of one who has been to school.
Mr. Traveller answered the inquiries.
"Did you come here, sir, to see ME?"
"I did. I heard of you, and I came to see you.--I know you like to be seen." Mr. Traveller coolly threw the last words in, as a matter of course, to forestall an affectation of resentment or objection that he saw rising beneath the grease and grime of the face. They had their effect.
"So," said the Hermit, after a momentary silence, unclasping the bars by which he had previously held, and seating himself behind them on the ledge of the window, with his bare legs and feet crouched up, "you know I like to be seen?"
Mr. Traveller looked about him for something to sit on, and, observing a billet of wood in a corner, brought it near the window. Deliberately seating himself upon it, he answered, "Just so."
Each looked at the other, and each appeared to take some pains to get the measure of the other.
"Then you have come to ask me why I lead this life," said the Hermit, frowning in a stormy manner. "I never tell that to any human being. I will not be asked that."
"Certainly you will not be asked that by me," said Mr. Traveller, "for I have not the slightest desire to know."
"You are an uncouth man," said Mr. Mopes the Hermit.
"You are another," said Mr. Traveller.
The Hermit, who was plainly in the habit of overawing his visitors with the novelty of his filth and his blanket and skewer, glared at his present visitor in some discomfiture and surprise: as if he had taken aim at him with a sure gun, and his piece had missed fire.
"Why do you come here at all?" he asked, after a pause.
"Upon my life," said Mr. Traveller, "I was made to ask myself that very question only a few minutes ago--by a Tinker too."
As he glanced towards the gate in saying it, the Hermit glanced in that direction likewise.
"Yes. He is lying on his back in the sunlight outside," said Mr, Traveller, as if he had been asked concerning the man, "and he won't come in; for he says--and really very reasonably--'What should I come in for? I can see a dirty man anywhere.'"
"You are an insolent person. Go away from my premises. Go!" said the Hermit, in an imperious and angry tone.
"Come, come!" returned Mr. Traveller, quite undisturbed. "This is a little too much. You are not going to call yourself clean? Look at your legs. And as to these being your premises:- they are in far too disgraceful a condition to claim any privilege of ownership, or anything else."
The Hermit bounced down from his window-ledge, and cast himself on his bed of soot and cinders.
"I am not going," said Mr. Traveller, glancing in after him; "you won't get rid of me in that way. You had better come and talk."
"I won't talk," said the Hermit, flouncing round to get his back towards the window.
"Then I will," said Mr. Traveller. "Why should you take it ill that I have no curiosity to know why you live this highly absurd and highly indecent life? When I contemplate a man in a state of