“‘Let me tell you your fortune, my noble little gentleman,’ I says.  ’The lines of life are crossed early with those of travelling.  Far will you wander, and many things will you see.  Stone houses and houses of brick will not detain you.  In the big house with the blue roof and the green carpet were you born, and in the big house with the blue roof and the green carpet will you die.  The big house is delicately perfumed, my noble little gentleman, especially in the month of May; at which time there is also an abundance of music, and the singers sits overhead.  Give the old gipsy woman a sight of your comely feet, my little gentleman, by the soles of which it is not difficult to see that you were born to wander.’

“With this and similar jaw I entertained him, my daughter, and his eyes looks up at me out of his face till I feels as if the dead had come back; but he had a way with him besides which frightened me, for I knew that it came from living with gentlefolk.

“‘Are you mighty learned, my dear?’ says I.  ’Are you well instructed in books and schooling?’

“‘I can say the English History in verse,’ he says, ’and I do compound addition; and I know my Catechism, and lots of hymns.  Would you like to hear me?’

“‘If you please, my little gentleman,’ I says.

“‘What shall I say?’ he asks.  ’I know all the English History, only I am not always quite sure how the kings come; but if you know the kings and can just give me the name, I know the verses quite well.  And I know the Catechism perfectly, but perhaps you don’t know the questions without the book.  The hymns of course you don’t want a book for, and I know them best of all.’

“‘I am not learned, myself,’ says I, ’and I only know of two kings—­the king of England—­who, for that matter, is a queen, and a very good woman, they say, if one could come at her—­and the king of the gipsies, who is as big a blackguard as you could desire to know, and by no means entitled to call himself king, though he gets a lot of money by it, which he spends in the public-house.  As regards the other thing, my dear, I certainly does not know the questions without the book, nor, indeed, should I know them with the book, which is neither here nor there; so if the hymns require no learning on my part, I gives the preference to them.’

“‘I like them best, myself,’ he says; and he puts his hat and his shoes and stockings on the ground, and stands up and folds his hands behind his back, and repeats a large number of religious verses, with the same readiness with which the young clergyman speaks out of a book.

“It partly went against me, my daughter, for I am not religious myself, and he was always too fond of holy words, which I thinks brings ill-luck.  But his voice was as sweet as a thrush that sits singing in a thorn-bush, and between that and a something in the verses which had a tendency to make you feel uncomfortable, I feels more disturbed than I cares to show.  But oh, my daughter, how I loves him!