Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/762

328 "I wish I had seen that man," Mr. 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 foot-steps 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 apace or two from the bars. "A compound of Newgate, Bedlam, a debtor's 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 he wore nothing else), with the matted hair and the staring eyes. Further, Mr. Traveller thought, as the eyes 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