e the first angry words baby had ever heard, and the experience
was so new and surprising that she checked her sobs, staring up at the
woman with frightened tear-filled eyes. She soon began to cry again,
but it was with much less violence, only a little distressed whimper
which no one noticed. This went on all day, and by the evening, having
refused to touch food, she fell into an exhausted slumber, broken by
plaintive moans. It was now dark, and being some miles from Keighley,
the tramps thought it safe to stop for the night; they turned off the
main road, therefore, tethered the donkey in a grassy lane, and crept
into an old disused barn for shelter. The two children, boys of eight
or nine years old, curled themselves up in a corner, with Mossoo, the
poodle, tucked in between them, and all three covered with an old
horse-cloth. The gypsy and his wife sat talking in the entrance over a
small fire of dry wood they had lighted.

"You've bin a fool, Seraminta," said the man, looking down at the baby
as she lay flushed with sleep on the woman's lap, her cheeks still wet
with tears. "The child'll git us into trouble. That's no common child.
Anyone 'ud know it agen, and then where are we? In quod, sure as my
name's Perrin."

"You're the fool," replied the woman, looking at the man scornfully.
"Think I'm goin' to take her about with a lily-white skin like that? A
little walnut-juice'll make her as brown as Bennie yonder, so as her own
mother wouldn't know her."

"Well, what good is she to us anyhow?" continued the man sulkily. "Only
another mouth ter feed. 'Tain't wuth the risk."

"You hav'n't the sperrit of a chicken," replied the woman. "One 'ud
think you was born yesterday, not to know that anyone'll give a copper
to a pretty little kid like her. Once we git away down south, an' she
gives over fretting, I mean her to go round with the tambourine after
the dog dances in the towns. She'll more than earn her keep soon."

The man muttered and growled to himself for a short time, and said some
very ugly words, but presently, stretched on the ground near the fire,
he settled himself to sleep. The short summer night passed quickly
away, and nothing disturbed the sleepers; the owls and bats flitted in
and out of the barn, as was their custom, and, surprised to find it no
longer empty, flapped suddenly up among the rafters, and looked down at
the strangers by the dim light of the moon; at the two children huddled