nd remarked,--

"Here I am, glad to see you; and if you want to see a regular _Romany
rye_ [gypsy gentleman], just over from England, now's your chance.
_Sarishan_!"

And I received, as I expected, a cordial welcome. I was invited to sit
down and eat, but excused myself as having just come from _habben_, or
food, and settled myself to a cigar. But while everybody was polite, I
felt that under it all there was a reserve, a chill. I was altogether
too heavy a mystery. I knew my friends, and they did not know me.
Something, however, now took place which went far to promote
conviviality. The tent-flap was lifted, and there entered an elderly
woman, who, as a gypsy, might have been the other four in one, she was so
quadruply dark, so fourfold uncanny, so too-too witch-like in her eyes.
The others had so far been reserved as to speaking Romany; she, glancing
at me keenly, began at once to talk it very fluently, without a word of
English, with the intention of testing me; but as I understood her
perfectly, and replied with a burning gush of the same language, being,
indeed, glad to have at last "got into my plate," we were friends in a
minute. I did not know then that I was talking with a celebrity whose
name has even been groomily recorded in an English book; but I found at
once that she was truly "a character." She had manifestly been sent for
to test the stranger, and I knew this, and made myself agreeable, and was
evidently found _tacho_, or all right. It being a rule, in fact, with
few exceptions, that when you really like people, in a friendly way, and
are glad to be among them, they never fail to find it out, and the jury
always comes to a favorable verdict.

And so we sat and talked on in the monotone in which Romany is generally
spoken, like an Indian song, while, like an Indian drum, the rain
pattered an accompaniment on the tightly drawn tent. Those who live in
cities, and who are always realizing self, and thinking how they think,
and are while awake given up to introverting vanity, never _live_ in
song. To do this one must be a child, an Indian, a dweller in fields and
green forests, a brother of the rain and road-puddles and rolling
streams, and a friend of the rustling leaves and the summer orchestra of
frogs and crickets and rippling grass. Those who hear this music and
think to it never think about it; those who live only in books never sing
to it in soul. As there are dreams which _will not_ be