ch, and that I should marry him; that I should move about
from place to place a great deal for a good while to come. That I had some
enemies, who should be sometimes so near as to be in the same room with me,
and yet they should not be able to hurt me. That I should see blood spilt
and yet not my own, and finally be very happy and splendid, like the
heroine of a fairy tale.

Did this strange, girlish charlatan see in my face some signs of shrinking
when she spoke of enemies, and set me down for a coward whose weakness
might be profitable? Very likely. At all events she plucked a long brass
pin, with a round bead for a head, from some part of her dress, and holding
the point in her fingers, and exhibiting the treasure before my eyes, she
told me that I must get a charmed pin like that, which her grandmother had
given to her, and she ran glibly through a story of all the magic expended
on it, and told me she could not part with it; but its virtue was that you
were to stick it through the blanket, and while it was there neither rat,
nor cat, nor snake--and then came two more terms in the catalogue, which I
suppose belonged to the gipsy dialect, and which she explained to mean, as
well as I could understand, the first a malevolent spirit, and the second
'a cove to cut your throat,' could approach or hurt you.

A charm like that, she gave me to understand, I must by hook or by crook
obtain. She had not a second. None of her people in the camp over there
possessed one. I am ashamed to confess that I actually paid her a pound for
this brass pin! The purchase was partly an indication of my temperament,
which could never let an opportunity pass away irrevocably without a
struggle, and always apprehended 'Some day or other I'll reproach myself
for having neglected it!' and partly a record of the trepidations of that
period of my life. At all events I had her pin, and she my pound, and I
venture to say I was the gladder of the two.

She stood on the road-side bank courtseying and smiling, the first
enchantress I had encountered, and I watched the receding picture, with its
patches of firelight, its dusky groups and donkey carts, white as skeletons
in the moonlight, as we drove rapidly away.

They, I suppose, had a wild sneer and a merry laugh over my purchase, as
they sat and ate their supper of stolen poultry, about their fire, and were
duly proud of belonging to the superior race.

Mary Quince, shocked at my prodigality, hint