which at eighty or ninety, in a woman, vividly reminds one of the Sabbat
on the Brocken, of the ointment, and all things terrible and unearthly
and forbidden.

I do not suppose that there are many people who can feel or understand
that among the fearfully dirty dwellers in tents and caravans,
cock-shysters and dealers in dogs of doubtful character, there can be
anything strange, and quaint, and deeply tinged with the spirit of which
I have spoken. As well might one attempt to persuade the twenty-stone
half-illiterate and wholly old-fashioned rural magistrate of the last
century that the poor devil of a hen-stealing Gipsy dragged before him
knew that which would send thrills of joy through the most learned
philologist in Europe, and cause the great band of scholars to sing for
joy. Life, to most of us, is nothing without its humour; and to me a
whilome German student illustrating his military marauding by phrases
from Fichte, or my friend Pauno the Rommany urging me with words to be
found in the Mahabahrata and Hafiz to buy a terrier, is a charming
experience.

I believe that my imagination has neither been led nor driven, when it
has so invariably, in my conversing with Gipsy women, recalled Faust, and
all I have ever read in Wierus, Bodinus, Bekker, Mather, or Glanvil, of
the sorceress and _sortilega_. And certainly on this earth I never met
with such a perfect _replica_ of Old Mother Baubo, the mother of all the
witches, as I once encountered at a certain race. Swarthy, black-eyed,
stout, half-centuried, fiercely cunning, and immoderately sensual, her
first salutation was expressed in a phrase such as a Corinthian soul
might be greeted with on entering that portion of the after-world devoted
to the fastest of the fair. With her came a tall, lithe, younger
sorceress; and verily the giant fat sow for her majesty, and the broom
for the attendant, were all that was wanting.

To return to the cottage. Our mirth and fun grew fast and furious; the
family were delighted with my anecdotes of the Rommany in other
lands--German, Bohemian, and Spanish,--not to mention the _gili_. And we
were just in the gayest centre of it all, "whin,--och, what a pity!--this
fine tay-party was suddenly broken up," as Patrick O'Flanegan remarked
when he was dancing with the chairs to the devil's fiddling, and his wife
entered. For in rushed a Gipsy boy announcing that Gorgios (or, as I may
say, "wite trash") were near at hand, and evi