u 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.

"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