er, for it
was original to actual eccentricity. It depicted a dark young woman
of dazzling beauty standing at break of day among mountain scenery,
holding a musical instrument of the guitar kind, but shaped like a
violin, upon the lower strings of which she was playing with the
thumb of the left hand.

Through the misty air were seen all kinds of shadowy shapes, whose
eyes were fixed on the player. I used to stand and look at this
picture by the hour together, fascinated by the strange beauty of the
singer's face and the mysterious, prophetic expression in the eyes.

And I used to try to imagine what tune it was that could call from
the mountain air the 'flower sprites' and 'sunshine elves' of morning
on the mountain.

Fenella Stanley seems in her later life to have set up as a positive
seeress, and I infer from certain family papers and diaries in my
possession that she was the very embodiment of the wildest Romany
beliefs and superstitions.

I first became conscious of the mysterious links which, bound me to
my Gypsy ancestress by reading one of her letters to my
great-grandfather, who had taught her to write: nothing apparently
could have taught her to spell. It was written during a short stay
she was making away from him in North Wales. It described in the
simplest (and often the most uncouth) words that Nature-ecstasy which
the Romanies seem to feel in the woodlands. It came upon me like a
revelation, for it was the first time I had ever seen embodied in
words the sensations which used to come to me in Graylingham Wood or
on the river that ran through it. After long basking among the
cowslips, or beneath the whispering branches of an elm, whose shade I
was robbing from the staring cows around, or lying on my hack in a
boat on the river, listening to the birds and the insect hum and all
the magic music of summer in the woodlands, I used all at once to
feel as though the hand of a great enchantress were being waved
before me and around me. The wheels of thought would stop; all the
senses would melt into one, and I would float on a tide of
unspeakable joy, a tide whose waves were waves neither of colour, nor
perfume, nor melody, but new waters born of the mixing of these; and
through a language deeper than words and deeper than thoughts, I
would seem carried at last close to an actual consciousness--a
consciousness which, to my childish dreams, seemed drawing me close
to the bosom of a mother whose face would br