appearing by this mystic word to express his assent to the
arrangement.

They have but to cross what was once the vineyard, belonging to
what was once the Monastery, to come into the narrow back lane
wherein stands the crazy wooden house of two low stories currently
known as the Travellers' Twopenny:- a house all warped and
distorted, like the morals of the travellers, with scant remains of
a lattice-work porch over the door, and also of a rustic fence
before its stamped-out garden; by reason of the travellers being so
bound to the premises by a tender sentiment (or so fond of having a
fire by the roadside in the course of the day), that they can never
be persuaded or threatened into departure, without violently
possessing themselves of some wooden forget-me-not, and bearing it
off.

The semblance of an inn is attempted to be given to this wretched
place by fragments of conventional red curtaining in the windows,
which rags are made muddily transparent in the night-season by
feeble lights of rush or cotton dip burning dully in the close air
of the inside. As Durdles and Jasper come near, they are addressed
by an inscribed paper lantern over the door, setting forth the
purport of the house. They are also addressed by some half-dozen
other hideous small boys--whether twopenny lodgers or followers or
hangers-on of such, who knows!--who, as if attracted by some
carrion-scent of Deputy in the air, start into the moonlight, as
vultures might gather in the desert, and instantly fall to stoning
him and one another.

'Stop, you young brutes,' cries Jasper angrily, 'and let us go by!'