accordingly
went thither, and he follows: after their first salutations, his
friends enquire how he came to lead so odd a life as that was, and to
joyn himself with such a _cheating beggerly_ company. The _Scholar-
Gypsy_ having given them an account of the necessity which drove him
to that kind of life, told them that the people he went with were not
such _Impostouirs_ as they were taken for, but that they had a
_traditional_ kind of _learning_ among them, and could do wonders by
the power of _Imagination_, and that himself had learnt much of their
Art, and improved it further then themselves could. And to evince the
truth of what he told them, he said, he'd remove into another room,
leaving them to discourse together, and upon his return tell them the
sum of what they had talked of: which accordingly he perform'd, giving
them a full account of what had passed between them in his absence.
The _Scholars_ being amaz'd at so unexpected a discovery, earnestly
desir'd him to unriddle the _mystery_. In which he gave them
satisfaction, by telling them, that what he did was by the power of
_Imagination_, his Phancy _binding_ theirs, and that himself had
dictated to them the discourse they held together, while he was from
them: That there were warrantable wayes of heightening the
_Imagination_ to that pitch as to bind anothers, and that when he had
compass'd the whole _secret_, some parts of which he said he was yet
ignorant of, he intended to leave their company, and give the world an
account of what he had learned."

The third of our Romany Ryes is a Scottish peer and a Jacobite, George
Seton, fifth Earl of Wintoun (1679-1749). He as a young man quarrelled
with his father, and, taking up with a band of Gypsies who frequented the
Seton property, set off with them on their wanderings over Scotland,
England, and the Continent. He seems to have been away from June 1700
until November 1707: and when, by his father's death in 1704, he
succeeded to the earldom, "no man knew where to find him, till accident
led to the discovery." The Rev. Robert Patten, the Judas and the
historian of the '15, records how, on the rebels' march from Kelso to
Preston, Lord Wintoun would tell "many pleasant Stories of his Travels
and his living unknown and obscurely with a Blacksmith in France, whom he
served some years as a Bellows-blower and Under-Servant. He was," Patten
adds