’Brother, you are an arrant ring-maker and a horse-breaker; you’ll make a hempen ring to break your own neck of a horse one of these days.’

They pressed their horses’ flanks, again leaped over the ditches, and speedily vanished, amidst the whirlwinds of dust which they raised upon the road.

The words of the phantom Gypsy were ominous.  Gypsy Will was eventually executed for a murder committed in his early youth in company with two English labourers, one of whom confessed the fact on his death-bed.  He was the head of the clan Young, which, with the clan Smith, still haunts two of the eastern counties.

* * * * *

‘I say, Jasper, what remarkable names your people have!’

’And what pretty names, brother; there’s my own for example, Jasper; then there’s Ambrose and Sylvester; then there’s Culvato, which signifies Claude; then there’s Piramus—­that’s a nice name, brother.’

’Then there’s your wife’s name, Pakomovna; then there’s Ursula and Morella.’

‘Then, brother, there’s Ercilla.’

’Ercilla! the name of the great poet of Spain, how wonderful; then Leviathan.’

’The name of a ship, brother; Leviathan was named after a ship, so don’t make a wonder out of her.  But there’s Sanpriel and Synfye.’

’Ay, and Clementina and Lavinia, Camillia and Lydia, Curlanda and Orlanda; wherever did they get those names?’

‘Where did my wife get her necklace, brother?’

‘She knows best, Jasper.  I hope—­’

’Come, no hoping!  She got it from her grandmother, who died at the age of 103, and sleeps in Coggeshall churchyard.  She got it from her mother, who also died very old, and who could give no other account of it than that it had been in the family time out of mind.’

‘Whence could they have got it?’

’Why, perhaps where they got their names, brother.  A gentleman, who had travelled much, once told me that he had seen the sister of it about the neck of an Indian queen.’

’Some of your names, Jasper, appear to be church names; your own, for example, and Ambrose, and Sylvester; perhaps you got them from the Papists, in the times of Popery; but where did you get such a name as Piramus, a name of Grecian romance?  Then some of them appear to be Slavonian; for example, Mikailia and Pakomovna.  I don’t know much of Slavonian; but—­’

‘What is Slavonian, brother?’

’The family name of certain nations, the principal of which is the Russian, and from which the word slave is originally derived.  You have heard of the Russians, Jasper?’

’Yes, brother, and seen some.  I saw their crallis at the time of the peace; he was not a bad-looking man for a Russian.’

’By-the-bye, Jasper, I’m half-inclined to think that crallis is a Slavish word.  I saw something like it in a lil called Voltaire’s Life of Charles.  How you should have come by such names and words is to me incomprehensible.’