I first became conscious of the mysterious links which, bound me to my Gypsy ancestress by reading one of her letters to my great-grandfather, who had taught her to write:  nothing apparently could have taught her to spell.  It was written during a short stay she was making away from him in North Wales.  It described in the simplest (and often the most uncouth) words that Nature-ecstasy which the Romanies seem to feel in the woodlands.  It came upon me like a revelation, for it was the first time I had ever seen embodied in words the sensations which used to come to me in Graylingham Wood or on the river that ran through it.  After long basking among the cowslips, or beneath the whispering branches of an elm, whose shade I was robbing from the staring cows around, or lying on my hack in a boat on the river, listening to the birds and the insect hum and all the magic music of summer in the woodlands, I used all at once to feel as though the hand of a great enchantress were being waved before me and around me.  The wheels of thought would stop; all the senses would melt into one, and I would float on a tide of unspeakable joy, a tide whose waves were waves neither of colour, nor perfume, nor melody, but new waters born of the mixing of these; and through a language deeper than words and deeper than thoughts, I would seem carried at last close to an actual consciousness—­a consciousness which, to my childish dreams, seemed drawing me close to the bosom of a mother whose face would brighten into that of Feuella.

My father lived upon moderate means in the little seaside town of Raxton.  My mother was his second wife, a distant cousin of the same name.  She was not one of the ‘Proud Aylwins,’ and yet she must have had more pride in her heart than all the ‘Proud Aylwins’ put together.  Her feeling in relation to the strain of Gypsy blood in the family into which she had married was that of positive terror.  She associated the word ‘Gypsy’ with everything that is wild, passionate, and lawless.

One great cause undoubtedly of her partiality for Frank and her dislike of me was that Frank’s blue-eyed Saxon face showed no sign whatever of the Romany strain, while my swarthy face did.

As I write this, she lives before me with more vividness than my father, for the reason that her character during my childhood, before I came to know my father thoroughly—­before I came to know what a marvellous man he was—­seemed to be a thousand times more vivid than his.  With her bright grey eyes, her patrician features, I shall see her while memory lasts.  The only differences that ever arose between my father and my other were connected with the fact that my father had a former wife.  Now and then (not often) my mother would lose her stoical self-command, and there would come from her an explosion of jealous anger, stormy and terrible.  This was on occasions when she perceived bat my father’s memory retained too vividly the impression left on