"Come, come!" returned Mr. Traveller, quite undisturbed. "This is a little too much. You are not going to call yourself clean? Look at your legs. And as to these being your premises:—they are in far too disgraceful a condition to claim any privilege of ownership, or anything else."
The Hermit bounced down from his window-ledge, and cast himself on his bed of soot and cinders.
"I am not going," said Mr. Traveller, glancing in after him; "you won′t get rid of me in that way. You had better come and talk."
"I won′t talk," said the Hermit, flouncing round to get his back towards the window.
"Then I will," said Mr. Traveller. "Why should you take it ill that I have no curiosity to know why you live this highly absurd and highly indecent life? When I contemplate a man in a state of disease, surely there is no moral obligation on me to be anxious to know how he took it."
After a short silence, the Hermit bounced up again, and came back to the barred window.
"What? You are not gone?" he said, affecting to have supposed that he was.
"Nor going," Mr. Traveller replied: "I design to pass this summer day here."
"How dare you come, sir, upon my promises—" the Hermit was returning, when his visitor interrupted him.
"Really, you know, you must _not_ talk about your premises. I cannot allow such a place as this to be dignified with the name of premises."
"How dare you," said the Hermit, shaking his bars, "come in at my gate, to taunt me with being in a diseased state?"
"Why, Lord bless my soul," returned the other, very composedly, "you have not the face to say that you are in a wholesome state? Do allow me again to call your attention to your legs. Scrape yourself anywhere—with anything—and then tell me you are in a wholesome state. The fact is, Mr. Mopes, that you are not only a Nuisance—"
"A Nuisance?" repeated the Hermit, fiercely.
"What is a place in this obscene state of dilapidation but a Nuisance? What is a man in your obscene state of dilapidation but a Nuisance? Then, as you very well know, you cannot do without an audience, and your audience is a Nuisance. You attract all the disreputable vagabonds and prowlers within ten miles around, by exhibiting yourself to them in that objectionable blanket, and by throwing copper money among them, and giving them drink out of those very dirty jars and bottles that I see in there (their stomachs need be strong!); and in short," said Mr. Traveller, summing up in a quietly and comfortably settled manner, "you are a Nuisance, and this kennel is a Nuisance, and the audience that you cannot possibly dispense with is a Nuisance, and the Nuisance is not merely a local Nuisance, because it is a general Nuisance to know that there _can be_ such a Nuisance left in civilisation so very long after its time."
"Will you go away? I have a gun in here," said the Hermit.
"Pooh!"
"I _have_!"
"Now, I put it to you. Did I say you had not? And as to going away, didn′t I say I am not going away? You have made me forget where I was. I now remember that I was remarking on your conduct being a Nuisance. Moreover, it is in the last and lowest degree inconsequent foolishness and weakness."
"Weakness?" echoed the Hermit.
"Weakness," said Mr. Traveller, with his former comfortably settled final air.
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