an whose trade is the sword, especially if he's
a gentleman," he added. "I'm one myself, though I keep a sort of poor
hostel here. I'm a young son."

We were joined by the gipsy, a bold tall man with very black and lambent
eyes, hiccoughing with drink but not by any means drunken, who took out
a wallet and insisted on my joining now in his drink. I dare not refuse
the courtesy.

"Would you like your fortune spaed, sir?" asked my black friend,
twitching his thumb in the direction of his wife, who was leering on me
with a friendliness begot of the bottle. The place was full of deafening
noises and peat-smoke. Fiddle jigged and pipes snored in the deep notes
of debauchery, and the little Jew's-trump twanged between the teeth of a
dirty-faced man in a saffron shirt and hodden breeks, wanting jacket and
hose--a wizen little old man, going around the world living like a poet
in realms whereto trump and tipple could readily bring him.

"Spae my fortune!" said I, laughing; "such swatches of the same as I
had in the past were of no nature to make me eager to see what was to
follow."

"Still and on," said he, "who knows but you may find a wife and a good
fortune in a little lurk of the thumb? Jean! Jean! woman," he
cried across the chamber to his callet, and over she came to a very
indifferent and dubious client.

I had got my hand read a score of times ere this (for I am of a nature
curious and prying), and each time the reading was different, but it did
not altogether shake my faith in wise women; so, half for the fun of it,
I put some silver pieces in the loof of my hand and held it before the
woman, the transaction unnoticed by the company. She gave the common
harangue to start with. At last, "There's a girl with a child," said
she.

"Faith, and she never went to the well with the dish-clout then," said
the black man, using a well-known Gaelic proverb, meaning a compliment
in his dirty assumption.

"She's in a place of many houses now," went on the woman, busy upon the
lines of my hand, "and her mind is taken up with a man in the ranks of
Argile."

"That's not reading the hand at all, goodwife," said I; "those small
facts of life are never written in a line across the loof."

"Jean is no apprentice at the trade," said her man across her shoulder.
"She can find a life's history in the space of a hair."

"The man found the woman and the child under a root of fir," said the
woman, "and if the man is not very quick t