charcoal-burner who found them changed to gold. Coins are called shiners
because they shine like glowing coals, and I dare say that the simile
exists in many more languages.

One twilight we found in the public sitting-room of the lodging-house a
couple whom I can never forget. It was an elderly gypsy and his wife.
The husband was himself characteristic; the wife was more than merely
picturesque. I have never met such a superb old Romany as she was;
indeed, I doubt if I ever saw any woman of her age, in any land or any
range of life, with a more magnificently proud expression or such
unaffected dignity. It was the whole poem of "Crescentius" living in
modern time in other form.

When a scholar associates much with gypsies there is developed in him in
due time a perception or intuition of certain kinds of men or minds,
which it is as difficult to describe as it is wonderful. He who has read
Matthew Arnold's "Gipsy Scholar" may, however, find therein many apt
words for it. I mean very seriously what I say; I mean that through the
Romany the demon of Socrates acquires distinctness; I mean that a faculty
is developed which is as strange as divination, and which is greatly akin
to it. The gypsies themselves apply it directly to palmistry; were they
well educated they would feel it in higher forms. It may be reached
among other races and in other modes, and Nature is always offering it to
us freely; but it seems to live, or at least to be most developed, among
the Romany. It comes upon the possessor far more powerfully when in
contact with certain lives than with others, and with the sympathetic it
takes in at a glance that which may employ it at intervals for years to
think out.

And by this _duk_ I read in a few words in the Romany woman an eagle
soul, caged between the bars of poverty, ignorance, and custom; but a
great soul for all that. Both she and her husband were of the old type
of their race, now so rare in England, though commoner in America. They
spoke Romany with inflection and conjugation; they remembered the old
rhymes and old words, which I quoted freely, with the Palmer. Little by
little, the old man seemed to be deeply impressed, indeed awed, by our
utterly inexplicable knowledge. I wore a velveteen coat, and had on a
broad, soft felt hat.

"You talk as the old Romanys did," said the old man. "I hear you use
words which I once heard from old men who died when I was a boy. I
thought those w