"You may do that, brother," said Mr. Petulengro, "whether you have money
or not. Our tents and horses are on the other side of yonder wooded
hill, come and stay with us; we shall all be glad of your company, but
more especially myself and my wife Pakomovna."

"What hill is that?" I demanded.

And then Mr. Petulengro told me the name of the hill. "We stay on
t'other side of the hill a fortnight," he continued; "and as you are fond
of lil writing, you may employ yourself profitably whilst there. You can
write the lil of him whose dook gallops down that hill every night, even
as the living man was wont to do long ago."

"Who was he?" I demanded.

"Jemmy Abershaw," said Mr. Petulengro; "one of those whom we call Boro
drom engroes, and the gorgios highwaymen. I once heard a rye say that
the life of that man would fetch much money; so come to the other side of
the hill, and write the lil in the tent of Jasper and his wife
Pakomovna."

At first I felt inclined to accept the invitation of Mr. Petulengro; a
little consideration, however, determined me to decline it. I had always
been on excellent terms with Mr. Petulengro, but I reflected that people
might be excellent friends when they met occasionally in the street, or
on the heath, or in the wood; but that these very people when living
together in a house, to say nothing of a tent, might quarrel. I
reflected, moreover, that Mr. Petulengro had a wife. I had always, it is
true, been a great favourite with Mrs. Petulengro, who had frequently
been loud in her commendation of the young rye, as she called me, and his
turn of conversation; but this was at a time when I stood in need of
nothing, lived under my parents' roof, and only visited at the tents to
divert and to be diverted. The times were altered, and I was by no means
certain that Mrs. Petulengro, when she should discover that I was in need
both of shelter and subsistence, might not alter her opinion both with
respect to the individual and what he said--stigmatizing my conversation
as saucy discourse, and myself as a scurvy companion; and that she might
bring over her husband to her own way of thinking, provided, indeed, he
should need any conducting. I therefore, though without declaring my
reasons, declined the offer of Mr. Petulengro, and presently, after
shaking him by the hand, bent again my course towards the Great City.

I crossed the river at a bridge considerably above that hight of London;
for, no