“‘The blessing of an old gipsy woman on your young head,’ I says.  ’Fair be the skies under which you wanders, and shady the spots in which you rests!

“’May the water be clear and the wood dry where you camps!

“’May every road you treads have turf by the wayside, and the patteran[B] of a friend on the left.’

“‘What is the patteran?’ he asks.

“‘It is a secret,’ I says, looking somewhat sternly at him.  ’The roads keeps it, and the hedges keeps it—­’

“‘I can keep it,’ he says boldly.  ‘Pinch my finger, and try me!’

“As he speaks he holds out his little finger, and I pinches it, my daughter, till the colour dies out of his lips, though he keeps them set, for I delights to see the nobleness and the endurance of him.  So I explains the patteran to him, and shows him ours with two bits of hawthorn laid crosswise, for I does not regard him as a stranger, and I sees that he can keep his lips shut when it is required.

“He was practising the patteran at my feet, when I hears the cry of ‘Christian!’ and I cannot explain to you the chill that came over my heart at the sound.

“Trouble and age and the lone company of your own thoughts, my daughter, has a tendency to confuse you; and I am not by any means rightly certain at times about things I sees and hears.  I sees Christian’s mother when I knows she can’t be there, and though I believes now that only one person was calling the child, yet, with the echo that comes from the quarry, and with worse than twenty echoes in my own mind, it seems to me that the wood is full of voices calling him.

“In my foolishness, my daughter, I sits like a stone, and he springs to his feet, and snatches up his things, and says, ’Good-bye, old gipsy woman, and thank you very much.  I should like to stay with you,’ he says, ’but Nurse is calling me, and Mother does get so frightened if I am long away and she doesn’t know where.  But I shall come back.’

“I never quite knows, my daughter, whether it was the echo that repeated his words, or whether it was my own voice I hears, as I stretches my old arms after him, crying, ‘Come back!’

“But he runs off shouting, ‘Coming, coming!’

“And the wood deafens me, it is so full of voices.

“Christian!  Christian!—­Coming!  Coming!

“And I thinks I has some kind of a fit, my daughter, for when I wakes, the wood is as still as death, and he is gone, as dreams goes.”

CHAPTER V.

“I really feel for the tinker-mother,” whispered Mrs. Hedgehog.

“I feel for her myself,” was my reply.  “The cares of a family are heavy enough when they only last for the season, and one sleeps them off in a winter’s nap.  When—­as in the case of men—­they last for a lifetime, and you never get more than one night’s rest at a time, they must be almost unendurable.  As to prolonging one’s anxieties from one’s own families to the families of each of one’s children—­no parent in his senses—­”