but I'd rather have a
sensation than a stagnation.

Those boys sat up. I said, "We are going to talk about gipsy life." I
talked to them about the origin of my people. There's not a man living in
the world who knows the origin of my people. I can trace my people back to
India, but they didn't come from India. We are one of the oldest races in
the world, so old that nobody knows how old. I talked to them about the
origin of the gipsies, and I don't know it, but I knew more about it than
they did. I talked to them about our language, and I gave them specimens
of it, and there I was on sure ground. It is a beautiful language, full of
poetry and music. Then I talked about the way the gipsies get their
living--and other people's; and for thirty minutes those Munsters hardly
knew if they were on the chairs or on the floor--and I purposely made them
laugh. They had just come out of the hell of the trenches. They had that
haunted, weary, hungry look, and if only I could make them laugh and
forget the hell out of which they had just climbed it was religion, and I
wasn't wasting time.

When I had been talking for thirty minutes, I stopped, and said, "Boys,
there's a lot more to this story. Would you like some more?"

"Yes," they shouted.

"Come back to-morrow," I said.

I was fishing in unlikely waters, and if you leave off when fish are
hungry they will come back for more. For six nights I told those boys
gipsy stories. I took them out into the woods. We went out amongst the
rabbits. I told the boys the rabbits got very fond of me--so fond that they
used to go home with me! I took them through the clover-fields on a June
day and made them smell the perfume. I took them among the buttercups. I
told them it was the Finger of Love and the Smile of Infinite Wisdom that
put the spots upon the pansy and the deep blue in the violet. And then we
went out among the birds and we saw God taking songs from the lips of a
seraph and wrapping them round with feathers.

And the boys saw Jesus in every buttercup and every primrose, and every
little daisy, and in every dewdrop, and heard something of the song of the
angels in the notes of the nightingale and the skylark. Oh! Jesus was
there, and they felt Him, and they saw Him. I took them amongst the gipsy
tents, amongst the woodlands and dells of the old camping-grounds. They
walked with Him and they talked with Him. I didn't use the usual Church
language, but I used the language of God