ords were lying in graves which have long been green. I
hear songs and sayings which I never expected to hear again. You talk
like gypsies, and such gypsies as I never meet now; and you look like
Gorgios. But when I was still young, a few of the oldest Romany _chals_
still wore hats such as you have; and when I first looked at you, I
thought of them. I don't understand you. It is strange, very strange."

"It is the Romany _soul_," said his wife. "People take to what is in
them; if a bird were born a fox, it would love to fly."

I wondered what flights she would have taken if she had wings. But I
understood why the old man had spoken as he did; for, knowing that we had
intelligent listeners, the Palmer and I had brought forth all our best
and quaintest Romany curios, and these rural Welsh wanderers were not,
like their English pals, familiar with Romany ryes. And I was moved to
like them, and nobody perceives this sooner than a gypsy. The old couple
were the parents of young Lee, and said they had come to visit him; but I
think that it was rather to see us that we owed their presence in
Aberystwith. For the tinker and Anselo were at this time engaged, in
their secret and owl-like manner, as befitted men who were up to all
manner of ways that were dark, in collecting the most interesting
specimens of Romanys, for our especial study; and whenever this could be
managed so that it appeared entirely accidental and a surprise, then they
retired into their shadowed souls and chuckled with fiendish glee at
having managed things so charmingly. But it will be long ere I forget
how the old man's eye looked into the past as he recalled,--

"The hat of antique shape and coat of gray,
The same the gypsies wore,"

and went far away back through my words to words heard in the olden time,
by fires long since burnt out, beneath the flame-gilt branches of forests
which have sailed away as ships, farther than woods e'er went from
Dunsinane, and been wrecked in Southern seas. But though I could not
tell exactly what was in every room, I knew into what house his soul had
gone; and it was for this that the scholar-gypsy went from Oxford halls
"to learn strange arts and join a gypsy tribe." His friends had gone
from earth long since, and were laid to sleep; some, perhaps, far in the
wold and wild, amid the rocks, where fox and wild bird were their
visitors; but for an instant they rose again from their graves, and I
k