The people were Londoners, as Bessy knew, for she had often seen others. She had forgotten London herself—all of it but a large drab room with a row of little beds like her own, each bed with a board on it, for toys; and this, too, she would have forgotten (for she was very little indeed then) but that a large and terrible gentleman had come every day and hurt her bad leg. It was the Shadwell Hospital. But these were Londoners, and Bessy was a little afraid of them, and conceived London to be a very merry and noisy place, very badly broken, everywhere, by reason of the Londoners. Other people, also, came in waggonettes, and were a little quieter, and less gloriously bedecked. She had seen such a party earlier in the day. Probably they were not real Londoners, but folk from parts adjoining. But these—these were Londoners proper, wearing each other’s hats, with paper wreaths on them. “Wayo, old ’un!” bawled one, as the old man, net in hand, crossed toward the wood opposite; “bin ketchin’ tiddlers?” And he turned to his companions with a burst of laughter and a jerk of the thumb. “D’year, Bill! ’Ere’s yer ole gran’father ketchin’ tiddlers! Why doncher keep ’im out o’ mischief?” And every flushed face, doubly reddened by the setting sun, turned and opened its mouth in a guffaw. “You’ll cop it for gittin’ yer trouseys wet!” screamed a woman. And somebody flung a lump of crust. Bessy jogged the faster into the wood, and in its shadow her grandfather, smiling doubtfully, said, “They like their joke, some of ’em, don’t they? But it’s always ’tiddlers’!” It grew dusk under the trees, and the sky was pale above. They came to where the ground fell away in a glen that was almost a trench, and a brook ran in the ultimate furrow. On the opposing hill a broad green ride stood like a wall before them, a deep moss of trees clinging at each side. Here they turned, and, where the glen widened, a cottage was to be seen on sloping ground, with a narrow roadway a little beyond it. A whitewashed cottage, so small that there seemed scarce a score of tiles on its roof; one of the few scattered habitations holding its place in the forest by right of ancient settlement. A little tumult of garden tumbled about the cottage—a jostle of cabbages, lavender, onions, wallflowers and hollyhock, confined, as with difficulty, by a precarious fence, patched with wood in every form of manufacture and in every stage of decay. “I expect mother and Johnny finished tea long ago,” Bessy remarked, her eyes fixed on the cottage. “Why there’s a light!” The path they went by grew barer of grass as it neared the cottage, and as they trod it, men’s voices could be heard from within, and a woman’s laughter. “Sounds like visitors!” the old man exclaimed. “That’s odd. I wonder who . . . ”