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 nottalk 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 besuch 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.
“I weak, you fool?” cried the Hermit, “I, who have held to my purpose, and my diet, and my only bed there, all these years?”
“The more the years, the weaker you,” returned Mr. Traveller. “Though the years are not so many as folks say, and as you willingly take credit for. The crust upon your face is thick and dark, Mr. Mopes, but I can see enough of you through it, to see that you are still a young man.”
“Inconsequent foolishness is lunacy, I suppose?” said the Hermit.
“I suppose it is very like it,” answered Mr. Traveller.
“Do I converse like a lunatic?”
“One of us two must have a strong presumption against him of being one, whether or no. Either the clean and decorously clad man, or the dirty and indecorously clad man. I don’t say which.”
“Why, you self-sufficient bear,” said the Hermit, “not a day passes but I am justified in my purpose by the conversations I hold here; not a day passes but I am shown, by everything I hear and see here, how right and strong I am in holding my purpose.”
Mr. Traveller, lounging easily on his billet of wood, took out a pocket pipe and began to fill it. “Now, that a man,” he said, appealing to the summer sky as he did so, “that a man—even behind bars, in a blanket and skewer—should tell me that he can see, from day to day, any orders or conditions of men, women, or children, who can by any possibility teach him that it is anything but the miserablest drivelling for a human creature to quarrel with his social nature—not to go so far as to say, to renounce his common human decency, for that is an extreme case; or who can teach him that he can in any wise separate himself from his kind and the habits of his kind, without becoming a deteriorated spectacle calculated to give the Devil (and perhaps the monkeys) pleasure,—is something wonderful! I repeat,” said Mr.