This _is_ a game, a jolly game, and no mistake.
And uplifting her voice again, as the voice of one who findeth an
exceeding great treasure even in the wilderness, she cried aloud,--"_It's
a Romany rye_!"

The spiciest and saltest and rosiest of Sir Patrick's own stories, told
after dinner over his own old port to a special conventicle of clergymen
about town, was never received with such a roar of delight as that cry of
Athalia's was by the Romany clan. Up went three sheers at the find;
further afield went the shout proclaiming the discovery of an
aristocratic stranger of their race, a _rye_, who was to them as
wheat,--a gypsy gentleman. Neglecting business, they threw down their
sticks, and left their cocoanuts to grin in solitude; the _dyes_ turned
aside from fortune-telling to see what strange fortune had sent such a
visitor. In ten minutes Sir Patrick and I were surrounded by such a
circle of sudden admirers and vehement applauders, as it seldom happens
to any mortal to acquire--out of Ireland--at such exceedingly short
notice and on such easy terms.

They were not particular as to what sort of a gypsy I was, or where I
came from, or any nonsense of that sort, you know. It was about
_cerevisia vincit omnia_, or the beery time of day with them, and they
cared not for anything. I was extremely welcome; in short, there was
poetry in me. I had come down on them by a way that was dark and a trick
that was vain, in the path of mystery, and dropped on Athalia and picked
her up. It was gypsily done and very creditable to me, and even Sir
Patrick was regarded as one to be honored as an accomplice. It is a
charming novelty in every life to have the better class of one's own kind
come into it, and nobody feels so keenly as a jolly Romany that _jucundum
nihil est nisi quod ref icit varietas_--naught pleases us without
variety.

Then and there I drew to me the first threads of what became in
after-days a strange and varied skein of humanity. There was the Thames
upon a holiday. Now I look back to it, I ask, _Ubi sunt_? (Where are
they all?) Joshua Cooper, as good and earnest a Rom as ever lived, in
his grave, with more than one of those who made my acquaintance by
hurrahing for me. Some in America, some wandering wide. Yet there by
Weybridge still the Thames runs on.

By that sweet river I made many a song. One of these, to the tune of
"Waves in Sunlight Dancing," rises and falls in memory like a fitful
fair