e a gentleman's
tongue, I knows the ring o' that. How comes you out here? Who's your
mate there down below? Now, see, I'm going to lift my stick.'

At these menacing words the girl jumped out of the blanket, and I called
to him that I would rouse the farmer.

'Why... because I'm goin' to knock down a apple or two on your head?' he
inquired, in a tone of reproach. 'It's a young woman you've got there,
eh? Well, odd grows odder, like the man who turned three shillings into
five. Now, you gi' me a lie under your blanket, I 'll knock down a apple
apiece. If ever you've tasted gin, you 'll say a apple at night's a
cordial, though it don't intoxicate.'

The girl whispered in my ear, 'He's lame as ducks.' Her meaning seized
me at once; we both sprang out of the ditch and ran, dragging our
blanket behind us. He pursued, but we eluded him, and dropped on a quiet
sleeping-place among furzes. Next morning, when we took the blanket
to the farm-house, we heard that the old wretch had traduced our
characters, and got a breakfast through charging us with the robbery of
the apple-tree. I proved our innocence to the farmer's wife by putting
down a shilling. The sight of it satisfied her. She combed my hair,
brought me a bowl of water and a towel, and then gave us a bowl of milk
and bread, and dismissed us, telling me I had a fair face and dare-devil
written on it: as for the girl, she said of her that she knew gipsies
at a glance, and what God Almighty made them for there was no guessing.
This set me thinking all through the day, 'What can they have been made
for?' I bought a red scarf for the girl, and other things she fixed her
eyes on, but I lost a great deal of my feeling of fellowship with her.
'I dare say they were made for fun,' I thought, when people laughed at
us now, and I laughed also.

I had a day of rollicking laughter, puzzling the girl, who could only
grin two or three seconds at a time, and then stared like a dog that
waits for his master to send him off again running, the corners of her
mouth twitching for me to laugh or speak, exactly as a dog might wag
his tail. I studied her in the light of a harmless sort of unaccountable
creature; witness at any rate for the fact that I had escaped from
school.

We loitered half the morning round a cricketers' booth in a field,
where there was moderately good cricketing. The people thought it of
first-rate quality. I told them I knew a fellow who could bowl out
either eleven