down to sleep; I discovered that
she would never have hooted over churchyard graves in the night. She
confessed she believed the devil went about in the night. Our bed was a
cart under a shed, our bed-clothes fern-leaves and armfuls of straw. The
shafts of the cart were down, so we lay between upright and level, and
awakening in the early light I found our four legs hanging over the seat
in front. 'How you have been kicking!' said I. She accused me of the
same. Next minute she pointed over the side of the cart, and I saw the
tramp's horse and his tents beneath a broad roadside oak-tree. Her face
was comical, just like a boy's who thinks he has escaped and is caught.
'Let's run,' she said. Preferring positive independence, I followed
her, and then she told me that she had overheard the tramp last night
swearing I was as good as a fistful of half-crowns lost to him if he
missed me. The image of Rippenger's school overshadowed me at this
communication. With some melancholy I said: 'You'll join your friends,
won't you?'

She snapped her fingers: 'Mumpers!' and walked on carelessly.

We were now on the great heaths. They brought the memory of my father
vividly; the smell of the air half inclined me to turn my steps toward
London, I grew so full of longing for him. Nevertheless I resolved
to have one gaze at Riversley, my aunt Dorothy, and Sewis, the old
grey-brown butler, and the lamb that had grown a sheep; wonderful
contrasts to my grand kings of England career. My first clear
recollection of Riversley was here, like an outline of a hill seen miles
away. I might have shed a tear or two out of love for my father, had not
the thought that I was a very queer boy displaced his image. I could not
but be a very queer boy, such a lot of things happened to me. Suppose
I joined the gipsies? My companion wished me to. She had brothers,
horse-dealers, beautiful fiddlers. Suppose I learnt the fiddle? Suppose
I learnt their language and went about with them and became king of
the gipsies? My companion shook her head; she could not encourage this
ambitious idea because she had never heard of a king of the gipsies or
a queen either. 'We fool people,' she said, and offended me, for our
school believed in a gipsy king, and one fellow, Hackman, used to sing a
song of a gipsy king; and it was as much as to say that my schoolfellows
were fools, every one of them. I accused her of telling lies. She
grinned angrily. 'I don't tell 'em to friend