ef, and,
on being told to keep it, was greatly pleased. I saw that the way in
which it was given had won her heart.

"Did you hear what the old woman said while she was telling your
fortune?" asked L., after we had left the tent.

"Now, I think of it, I remember that she or you had hold of my hand,
while I was talking with the old man, and he was making merry with my
whisky. I was turned away, and around so that I never noticed what you
two were saying."

"She _penned_ your _dukkerin_, and it was wonderful. She said that she
must tell it."

And here L. told me what the old _dye_ had insisted on reading in my
hand. It was simply very remarkable, and embraced an apparent knowledge
of the past, which would make any credulous person believe in her happy
predictions of the future.

"Ah, well," I said, "I suppose the _dukk_ told it to her. She may be an
eye-reader. A hint dropped here and there, unconsciously, the expression
of the face, and a life's practice will make anybody a witch. And if
there ever was a witch's eye, she has it."

"I would like to have her picture," said L., "in that _lullo diklo_ [red
handkerchief]. She looked like all the sorceresses of Thessaly and Egypt
in one, and, as Bulwer says of the Witch of Vesuvius, was all the more
terrible for having been beautiful."

Some time after this we went, with Britannia Lee a-gypsying, not
figuratively, but literally, over the river into New Jersey. And our
first greeting, as we touched the ground, was of good omen, and from a
great man, for it was Walt Whitman. It is not often that even a poet
meets with three sincerer admirers than the venerable bard encountered on
this occasion; so, of course, we stopped and talked, and L. had the
pleasure of being the first to communicate to Bon Gualtier certain
pleasant things which had recently been printed of him by a distinguished
English author, which is always an agreeable task. Blessed upon the
mountains, or at the Camden ferryboat, or anywhere, are the feet of
anybody who bringeth glad tidings.

"Well, are you going to see gypsies?"

"We are. We three gypsies be. By the abattoir. _Au revoir_."

And on we went to the place where I had first found gypsies in America.
All was at first so still that it seemed if no one could be camped in the
spot.

"_Se kekno adoi_." (There's nobody there.)

"_Dordi_!" cried Britannia, "_Dikkava me o tuv te tan te wardo_. [I see
a smoke, a tent, a wagon.] I d