ast been, and I will tell what thou wilt be"
gives a fine opportunity to the soothsayer.

To avoid mistakes I told the fortunes in French, which was translated
into Russian. I need not say that every word was listened to with
earnest attention, or that the group of dark but young and comely faces,
as they gathered around and bent over, would have made a good subject for
a picture. After the girls, the mother must needs hear her _dorriki_
also, and last of all the young Russian gentleman, who seemed to take as
earnest an interest in his future as even the gypsies. As he alone
understood French, and as he appeared to be _un peu gaillard_, and,
finally, as the lines of his hand said nothing to the contrary, I
predicted for him in detail a fortune in which _bonnes fortunes_ were not
at all wanting. I think he was pleased, but when I asked him if he would
translate what I had said of his future into Russian, he replied with a
slight wink and a scarcely perceptible negative. I suppose he had his
reasons for declining.

Then we had singing again, and Christopher, the brother, a wild and gay
young gypsy, became so excited that while playing the guitar he also
danced and caroled, and the sweet voices of the girls rose in chorus, and
I was again importuned for the _Romany_ song, and we had altogether a
very Bohemian frolic. I was sorry when the early twilight faded into
night, and I was obliged, notwithstanding many entreaties to the
contrary, to take my leave. These gypsies had been very friendly and
kind to me in a strange city, where I had not an acquaintance, and where
I had expected none. They had given me of their very best; for they gave
me songs which I can never forget, and which were better to me than all
the opera could bestow. The young Russian, polite to the last, went
bareheaded with me into the street, and, hailing a sleigh-driver, began
to bargain for me. In Moscow, as in other places, it makes a great
difference in the fare whether one takes a public conveyance from before
the first hotel or from a house in the gypsy quarter. I had paid seventy
kopecks to come, and I at once found that my new friend and the driver
were engaged in wild and fierce dispute whether I should pay twenty or
thirty to return.

"Oh, give him thirty!" I exclaimed. "It's little enough."

"_Non_," replied the Russian, with the air of a man of principles. "_Il
ne faut pas gater ces gens-la_." But I gave the driver thirty, all