I have always had a strong curiosity about hermits--remember I paid a shilling as a small boy, when I could ill afford it, to see one, somewhere up by Hampstead, a cruel disappointment--used to make shy approaches to lonely turnpike keepers before they were abolished, with no success; finding them always, like Johnson’s “hoary sage,” inclined to cut sentiment short with, “Come, my lad, and drink some beer,” I came to the conclusion long since that the genuine hermit is as extinct as the dodo in the British Isles. I was almost excited, therefore, the other morning, to get a note on a dirty scrap of paper here, asking for the loan of a book on geology, for, on inquiry, I found it came from “the Hermit.” He had suddenly appeared to the man who drives the hack, and sent it in by him. No one could tell me anything more except that the writer was “the Hermit,” and lived, no one knew how, in a shanty four miles away in the forest. I got the book out of the library, “loaned” a pony, and in due course found myself outside a dilapidated snake-fence, surrounding some three acres of half-cleared forest, and the rudest kind of log-hut; evidently the place I was in search of, but no hermit. While I was meditating my next move, a dismal howl, like, I should think, the “lulilooing” of Central Africa, came from out the neighbouring bush. I shouted myself, and in a few moments “the Hermit” appeared, and certainly at first glance “filled the bill” satisfactorily. His head was a tangled mass of long hair and beard, out of which shone two big, blue eyes; a long, lean figure, slightly bent, and clothed in a tattered shirt, and trousers which no old Jew clothesman would have picked off a dunghill. I explained my errand and produced the book.