Tom Tiddlers Ground | Page 6

Traveller remarked.
"You'd have been welcome to see him instead of me seeing him,"
growled the Tinker; "for he was a long-winded one."
Not without a sense of injury in the remembrance, the Tinker gloomily
closed his eyes. Mr. Traveller, deeming the Tinker a short-winded one,
from whom no further breath of information was to be derived, betook
himself to the gate.
Swung upon its rusty hinges, it admitted him into a yard in which there
was nothing to be seen but an outhouse attached to the ruined building,
with a barred window in it. As there were traces of many recent
footsteps under this window, and as it was a low window, and 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