r his
tent, just as any other man might have excused the absence of pictures
from his walls. The most beautiful spot for miles around Williamsport,
in Pennsylvania, a river dell, which any artist would give a day to
visit, is the favorite camping-ground of the Romany. Woods and water,
rocks and loneliness, make it lovely by day, and when, at eventide, the
fire of the wanderers lights up the scene, it also lights up in the soul
many a memory of tents in the wilderness, of pictures in the Louvre, of
Arabs and of Wouvermanns and belated walks by the Thames, and of Salvator
Rosa. Ask me why I haunt gypsydom. It has put me into a thousand
sympathies with nature and art, which I had never known without it. The
Romany, like the red Indian, and all who dwell by wood and wold as
outlawes wont to do, are the best human links to bind us to their
home-scenery, and lead us into its inner life. What constitutes the
antithetic charm of those wonderful lines,

"Afar in the desert, I love to ride,
With the silent bush-boy alone by my side,"

but the presence of the savage who belongs to the scene, and whose
_being_ binds the poet to it, and blends him with it as the flux causes
the fire to melt the gold?

I left the road, turned the corner, and saw before me the low, round
tents, with smoke rising from the tops, dark at first and spreading into
light gray, like scalp-locks and feathers upon Indian heads. Near them
were the gayly-painted vans, in which I at once observed a difference
from the more substantial-looking old-country _vardo_. The whole scene
was so English that I felt a flutter at the heart: it was a bit from over
the sea; it seemed as if hedge-rows should have been round, and an old
Gothic steeple looking over the trees. I thought of the last gypsy camp
I had seen near Henley-on-Thames, and wished Plato Buckland were with me
to share the fun which one was always sure to have on such an occasion in
his eccentric company. But now Plato was, like his father in the song,

"_Duro pardel the boro pani_,"
Far away over the broad-rolling sea,

and I must introduce myself. There was not a sign of life about, save in
a sorrowful hen, who looked as if she felt bitterly what it was to be a
Pariah among poultry and a down-pin, and who cluttered as if she might
have had a history of being borne from her bower in the dark midnight by
desperate African reivers, of a wild moonlit flitting and crossing black
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