thing of the human heart--little or nothing of
the stricken soul that looks out on man and his conventions through
the light of an intolerable pain.

I now began to read and study as well as paint. But so absorbed was I
in my struggle with Fenella Stanley and Romany superstitions, that
the only subject which could distract me from memory was that of
hereditary influence--prepotency of transmission in relation to
races. Though Sinfi could neither read nor write, she loved to sit by
my side and, caressing Pharaoh, to watch me as I read or wrote. To
her there evidently seemed something mysterious and uncanny in
writing, something like 'penning dukkering.' It seemed to her, I
think, a much more remarkable accomplishment than that of painting.
And as to reading, I am not sure that the satirical Videy was
entirely wrong in saying that Sinfi believed that books 'could talk
jis' like men and women.' Not a word would she speak, save when she
now and then bent down her head to whisper to Pharaoh when that
little warrior was inclined to give a disturbing chuckle, or to shake
his wattles. And when at last she and Pharaoh got wearied by the
prolonged silence, she would begin to murmur in a tone of playful
satire to the restless bird, 'Mum, mum, Pharaoh. He's too hoot of a
mush to rocker a choori chavi.' [Hush, hush, Pharaoh. He's too proud
to speak to a poor child.]

Of course there was immense curiosity about my life at the bungalow,
not only among the visitors at the Capel Curig Hotel, but among the
Welsh residents; and rarely did the weekly papers come out without
some paragraph about me. As a result of this, some of the London
papers reproduced the paragraphs, and built upon their gossip columns
of a positively offensive nature. In a paper which I will for
convenience call the _London Satirist_ appeared a paragraph which
some one cut out of the columns of the paper and posted to me. It ran
thus:

'THE ECCENTRIC AYLWINS.--The power of heredity, which has much
exercised the mind of Balzac, has never been more strikingly
exemplified than in the case of the great family of the Aylwins. It
is matter of common knowledge that some generations ago one of the
Aylwins married a Gypsy. This fact did not, however, prevent his
branch from being respectable, and receiving the name of the proud
Aylwins; and the Gypsy blood remained entirely in abeyance until the
present generation. Mr. Percy Aylwin, it will be remembered, having
been sm