m as was here
just now, 'this what you're a laying on, mate, is Tom Tiddler's ground.
And if you want to see Tom,' he says, 'you must go in at that gate.' The
man come out at that gate himself, and he ought to know."

"Certainly," said Mr. Traveller.

"Though, perhaps," exclaimed the Tinker, so struck by the brightness of
his own idea, that it had the electric effect upon him of causing him to
lift up his head an inch or so, "perhaps he was a liar! He told some rum
'uns--him as was here just now, did about this place of Tom's. He
says--him as was here just now--'When Tom shut up the house, mate, to go
to rack, the beds was left, all made, like as if somebody was a-going to
sleep in every bed. And if you was to walk through the bedrooms now,
you'd see the ragged mouldy bedclothes a heaving and a heaving like seas.
And a heaving and a heaving with what?' he says. 'Why, with the rats
under 'em.'"

"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
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 Debto