rom it. After all, the ancient Romans might be a tribe of
these people, who settled down and founded a village with the tilts of
carts, which by degrees, and the influx of other people, became the grand
city of the world. I liked the idea of the grand city of the world owing
its origin to a people who had been in the habit of carrying their houses
in their carts. Why, after all, should not the Romans of history be a
branch of these Romans? There were several points of similarity between
them; if Roman matrons were chaste, both men and women were thieves. Old
Rome was the thief of the world; yet still there were difficulties to be
removed before I could persuade myself that the old Romans and my Romans
were identical; and in trying to remove these difficulties, I felt my
brain once more beginning to turn, and in haste took up another subject
of meditation, and that was the patteran, and what Ursula had told me
about it.

I had always entertained a strange interest for that sign by which in
their wanderings the Romanese gave to those of their people who came
behind intimation as to the direction which they took; but it now
inspired me with greater interest than ever,--now that I had learned that
the proper meaning of it was the leaves of trees. I had, as I had said
in my dialogue with Ursula, been very eager to learn the word for leaf in
the Romanian language, but had never learned it till this day; so
patteran signified leaf, the leaf of a tree; and no one at present knew
that but myself and Ursula, who had learned it from Mrs. Herne, the last,
it was said, of the old stock; and then I thought what strange people the
gypsies must have been in the old time. They were sufficiently strange
at present, but they must have been far stranger of old; they must have
been a more peculiar people--their language must have been more
perfect--and they must have had a greater stock of strange secrets. I
almost wished that I had lived some two or three hundred years ago, that
I might have observed these people when they were yet stranger than at
present. I wondered whether I could have introduced myself to their
company at that period, whether I should have been so fortunate as to
meet such a strange, half-malicious, half good-humoured being as Jasper,
who would have instructed me in the language, then more deserving of note
than at present. What might I not have done with that language, had I
known it in its purity? Why, I mi