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 favourite 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 rickyard,
hip-high in vegetable rankness and ruin, contained outbuildings 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 heats of
summer, had warped what wreck remained, so that not a post or a 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 sluggard, 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 honeycomb, 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 branches lay across
it then--which in its accumulation of stagnant weed, and in its black