‘She has,’ said he, ’mesmeric power; it is only semiconscious, but it is mesmeric.  She exercises it partly through her gaze and partly through her voice.’

He was still talking about Sinfi when a river-boy, who was whistling with extraordinary brilliancy and gusto, met and passed us.  Not a word more of D’Arcy’s talk did I hear, for the boy was whistling the very air to which Winnie used to sing the Snowdon song

        I met in a glade a lone little maid
        At the foot of y Wyddfa the white.

I ran after the boy and asked him what tune he was whistling.

‘What tune?’ he said, ‘blowed if I know.’

‘Where did you hear it?’ I asked.

’Well, there used to be a gal, a kind of a beggar gal, as lived not far from ’ere for a little while, but she’s gone away now, and she used to sing that tune.  I allas remember tunes, but I never could make out anything of the words.’

D’Arcy laughed at my eccentricity in running after the boy to learn where he had got a tune.  But I did not tell him why.

After we had passed some way down Ratcliffe Highway, D’Arcy said, ‘Here we are then,’ and pointed to a shop, or rather two shops, on the opposite side of the street.  One window was filled with caged birds; the other with specimens of beautiful Oriental pottery and grotesque curiosities in the shape of Chinese and Japanese statues and carvings.

My brain still rang with the air I had heard the river-boy whistling, but I felt that I must talk about something.

‘It is here that you buy your wonderful curiosities and porcelain!’ I said.

’Partly; but there is not a curiosity shop in London that I have not ransacked in my time.’

The shop we now entered reminded me of that Raxton Fair which was so much associated with Winnie.  Its chief attraction was the advent of Wombwell’s menagerie.  From the first moment that the couriers of that august establishment came to paste their enormous placards on the walls, down to the sad morning when the caravans left the market-place, Winnie and I and Rhona Boswell had talked ‘Wombwell.’  It was not merely that the large pictures of the wild animals in action, the more than brassy sound of the cracked brass band, delighted our eyes and ears.  Our olfactories also were charmed.  The mousy scent of the animals mixed with the scent of sawdust, which to adults was so objectionable, was characterised by us as delicious.  All these Wombwell delights came back to me as we entered Jamrach’s, and for a time the picture of Winifred prevented my seeing the famous shop.  When this passed I saw that the walls of the large room were covered from top to bottom with cages, some of them full of wonderful or beautiful birds, and others full of evil-faced, screeching monkeys.

While D’Arcy was amusing himself with a blue-faced rib-nosed baboon, I asked Mr. Jamrach, an extremely intelligent man, about the singing girl and the Welsh air.  But he could tell me nothing, and evidently thought I had been hoaxed.