old
grey-brown butler, and the lamb that had grown a sheep; wonderful
contrasts to my grand kings of England career. My first clear
recollection of Riversley was here, like an outline of a hill seen miles
away. I might have shed a tear or two out of love for my father, had not
the thought that I was a very queer boy displaced his image. I could not
but be a very queer boy, such a lot of things happened to me. Suppose I
joined the gipsies? My companion wished me to. She had brothers,
horse-dealers, beautiful fiddlers. Suppose I learnt the fiddle? Suppose I
learnt their language and went about with them and became king of the
gipsies? My companion shook her head; she could not encourage this
ambitious idea because she had never heard of a king of the gipsies or a
queen either. 'We fool people,' she said, and offended me, for our school
believed in a gipsy king, and one fellow, Hackman, used to sing a song of
a gipsy king; and it was as much as to say that my schoolfellows were
fools, every one of them. I accused her of telling lies. She grinned
angrily. 'I don't tell 'em to friends,' she said. We had a quarrel. The
truth was, I was enraged at the sweeping out of my prospects of rising to
distinction among the gipsies. After breakfast at an inn, where a waiter
laughed at us to our faces, and we fed scowling, shy, and hungry, we had
another quarrel. I informed her of my opinion that gipsies could not tell
fortunes.

'They can, and you come to my mother and my aunt, and see if they can't
tell your fortune,' said she, in a fury.

'Yes, and that's how they fool people,' said I. I enjoyed seeing the
flash of her teeth. But my daring of her to look me in the eyes and swear
on her oath she believed the fortunes true ones, sent her into a fit of
sullenness.

'Go along, you nasty little fellow, your shadow isn't half a yard,' she
said, and I could smile at that; my shadow stretched half across the
road. We had a quarrelsome day wherever we went; rarely walking close
together till nightfall, when she edged up to my hand, with, 'I say, I'll
keep you warm to-night, I will.' She hugged me almost too tight, but it
was warm and social, and helped to the triumph of a feeling I had that
nothing made me regret running away from Rippenger's school.

An adventure befell us in the night. A farmer's wife, whom we asked for a
drink of water after dark, lent us an old blanket to cover us in a dry
ditch on receiving our promise not to rob the