and spend a night of mingled business and pleasure
with old Jan, reckoning up the profits on the Berkshires for which the
farm was now famous, and putting down big mugs of the "black drink" for
which Aunty Alice Lee, John Lane's ancient cousin, was equally famous.
The amount of this fiery and head-splitting liquor which the two old men
thus got away with was afterward gleefully recounted in the wagons and
fearfully whispered of in the little Dutch church at Horse's Neck which
the Jacobuses had attended for over a hundred years.

But never, as wagon after wagon had gone up the turning that led to the
upward farm, had there been a patteran pointing that way. Always, it had
shown the way onward and downward, to the little hamlet of Rockaway,
where there was an old and friendly camping place, back of the
blacksmith shop beyond the church. Old John never encouraged the wagons
to visit any of the properties held by the tribe.

"Silver blackens the salt of friendship," he would say.

Dora Parse was driving her own _wardo_, a very fine one which had
belonged to her mother. Lester Montague, of Sea Tack, Maryland, who
makes the wagons of Romanys for all the Atlantic coast tribes, like his
father before him, had done an especially good job of it. The princess
had been certified, by the Romany rites, to old John's eldest son,
George, for she had flatly refused to be married according to the gorgio
ways. Not having been married a full year, he was not yet entitled to
carry the heavy, silver-topped stick which is the badge of the married
man, nor could he demand a place in his wife's tent or wagon unless she
expressly invited him. Dora Parse and George Lane were passionately in
love with each other, and their meeting and mating had been the
flowering romance of the tribe, the previous summer.

The princess, being descended from a very old Romany family, as her name
showed, was far higher in rank than any one in the Lane tribe. Her
aristocratic lineage showed in the set of her magnificent head, in the
small, delicate fingers of her hand, and in the fire and richness of her
eyes. Also, her skin was of the colour of old ivory upon which is cast a
distant, faint reflection of the sunset, and her mouth, thinner than
those of most Romanys, was of the colour of a ripe pomegranate.

"A _rauni, a puro rauni_," all the tribes of the eastern coast murmured
respectfully, when Dora Parse's name was mentioned.

She was, indeed, a very great