Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/758

326 information was to be got, from those who must know if they would. He was represented as being all the ages between five-and-twenty and sixty, and as having been a hermit seven years, twelve, twenty, thirty—though twenty, on the whole, appeared the favorite term.

"Well, well!" said Mr. Traveller. "At any rate, let us see what a real live hermit looks like."

So Mr. Traveller went on, and on, and on, until he came to Tom Tiddler's Ground.

It was a nook in a rustic by-road, which the genius of Mopes had laid waste as completely as if he had been born an emperor and a conqueror. Its centre object was a dwelling-house, sufficiently substantial, all the window-glass of which had been long ago abolished by the surprising genius of Mopes, and all the windows of which were barred across with rough split logs of trees nailed over them on the outside. A rick-yard, hip-high in vegetable rankness and ruin, contained out-buildings, from which the thatch had lightly fluttered away, on all the winds of all the seasons of the year, and from which the planks and beams had heavily dropped and rotted. The frosts and damps of winter, and the heat of summer, had warped what wreck remained, so that not a post or board retained the position it was meant to hold, but everything was twisted from its purpose, like its owner, and degraded and debased. In this homestead of the shiggard, behind the ruined hedge, and sinking away among the ruined grass and the nettles, were the last perishing fragments of certain ricks, which had gradually mildewed and collapsed, until they looked like mounds of rotten honey-comb or dirty sponge. Tom Tiddler's Ground could even show its ruined water; for there was a slimy pond into which a tree or two had fallen—one soppy trunk and blanches lay across it then—which in its accumulation of stagnant weed, and in its black decomposition, and in all its foulness and filth, was almost comforting, regarded as the only water that could have reflected the shameful place without seeming polluted by that low office.

Mr. Traveller looked all around him on Tom Tiddler's Ground, and his glance at last encountered a dusky tinker lying among the weeds and rank grass, in the shade of the dwelling-house. A rough walking-staff lay on the ground by his side, and his head rested on a small wallet