en my wife saw me half-naked, she _says_, 'Where are your
clothes?' and I told her I had been fighting. But she said, 'Why, you
have not your stockings on; you didn't fight your stockings off!' 'No,'
I said; 'I drew them off.' (The man played me with a two-headed
halfpenny.)

"But in the morning when the man came to take away the dog (for I had
lost that too), I felt worse than when I lost all the other things. And
my poor wife cried again, for she had no child. I had in those days as
fine clothes as any young Gipsy in England--good coats, and shirts, and
handkerchiefs.

"And that man hurt many a man after me, but he never had any luck. He'd
steal from his own father; but he died miserably in East Kent."

It was characteristic of the venerable wanderer who had installed himself
as my permanent professor of Rommany, that although almost every phrase
which he employed to illustrate words expressed some act at variance with
law or the rights of property, he was never weary of descanting on the
spotlessness, beauty, and integrity of his own life and character. These
little essays on his moral perfection were expressed with a touching
artlessness and child-like simplicity which would carry conviction to any
one whose heart had not been utterly hardened, or whose eye-teeth had not
been remarkably well cut, by contact with the world. In his delightful
_naivete_ and simple earnestness, in his ready confidence in strangers
and freedom from all suspicion--in fact, in his whole deportment, this
Rommany elder reminded me continually of one--and of one man only--whom I
had known of old in America. Need I say that I refer to the excellent ---
---?

It happened for many days that the professor, being a man of early
habits, arrived at our rendezvous an hour in advance of the time
appointed. As he resolutely resisted all invitation to occupy the room
alone until my arrival, declaring that he had never been guilty of such a
breach of etiquette, and as he was, moreover, according to his word, the
most courteous man of the world in it, and I did not wish to "contrary"
him, he was obliged to pass the time in the street, which he did by
planting himself on the front steps or expanding himself on the railings
of an elderly and lonely dame, who could not endure that even a mechanic
should linger at her door, and was in agony until the milkman and baker
had removed their feet from her steps. Now, the appearance of the
professor (