tion soon grew interesting; to me as a matter of course, and
evidently to him also. A few general words led to interchange of remarks
upon the country we were both visitors in and so to national
characteristics--Pole and Irishman have not a few in common, both in their
nature and history. An observation which he made, not without a certain
flash in his light eyes and a transient uncovering of the teeth, on the
Irish type of female beauty suddenly suggested to me a stanza of an
ancient Polish ballad, very full of milk-and-blood imagery, of alternating
ferocity and voluptuousness. This I quoted to the astounded foreigner in
the vernacular, and this it was that metamorphosed his mere perfection of
civility into sudden warmth, and, in fact, procured me the invitation in
question.

"When I left Rathdrum the baron's last words to me were that if I ever
thought of visiting his country otherwise than in books, he held me bound
to make Yany, his Galician seat, my headquarters of study.

"From Czernowicz, therefore, where I stopped some time, I wrote, received
in due time a few lines of prettily worded reply, and ultimately entered
my sled in the nearest town to, yet at a most forbidding distance from,
Yany, and started on my journey thither.

"The undertaking meant many long hours of undulation and skidding over the
November snow, to the somniferous bell jangle of my dirty little horses,
the only impression of interest being a weird gypsy concert I came in for
at a miserable drinking-booth half buried in the snow where we halted for
the refreshment of man and beast. Here, I remember, I discovered a very
definite connection between the characteristic run of the tsimbol, the
peculiar bite of the Zigeuner's bow on his fiddle-string, and some
distinctive points of Turanian tongues. In other countries, in Spain, for
instance, your gypsy speaks differently on his instrument. But, oddly
enough, when I later attempted to put this observation on paper I could
find no word to express it."

A few of our company evinced signs of sleepiness, but most of us who knew
Marshfield, and that he could, unless he had something novel to say, be as
silent and retiring as he now evinced signs of being copious, awaited
further developments with patience. He has his own deliberate way of
speaking, which he evidently enjoys greatly, though it be occasionally
trying to his listeners.

"On the afternoon of my second day's drive, the snow, which till the