If I said nothing to the inmates of the cottage of all that the trushul or cross trident suggested, still less did I vex their souls with the mystic possible meaning of the antique patteran or sign which I had drawn.  For it has, I opine, a deep meaning, which as one who knew Creuzer of old, I have a right to set forth.  Briefly, then, and without encumbering my book with masses of authority, let me state that in all early lore, the road is a symbol of life; Christ himself having used it in this sense.  Cross roads were peculiarly meaning-full as indicating the meet-of life with life, of good with evil, a faith of which abundant traces are preserved in the fact that until the present generation suicides were buried at them, and magical rites and diabolic incantations are supposed to be most successful when practised in such places.  The English path, the Gipsy patteran, the Rommany-Hindu pat, a foot, and the Hindu panth, a road, all meet in the Sanscrit path, which was the original parting of the ways.  Now the patteran which I have drawn, like the Koua of the Chinese or the mystical Swastika of the Buddhists, embraces the long line of life, or of the infinite and the short, or broken lines of the finite, and, therefore, as an ancient magical Eastern sign, would be most appropriately inscribed as a sikker-paskero dromescro—­or hand post—­to show the wandering Rommany how to proceed on their way of life.

[Svastika:  ill27.jpg]

That the ordinary Christian Cross should be called by the English Gipsies a trin bongo drum—­or the three cross roads—­is not remarkable when we consider that their only association with it is that of a “wayshower,” as Germans would call it.  To you, reader, it may be that it points the way of eternal life; to the benighted Rommany-English-Hindoo, it indicates nothing more than the same old weary track of daily travel; of wayfare and warfare with the world, seeking food and too often finding none; living for petty joys and driven by dire need; lying down with poverty and rising with hunger, ignorant in his very wretchedness of a thousand things which he ought to want, and not knowing enough to miss them.

Just as the reader a thousand, or perhaps only a hundred, years hence—­should a copy of this work be then extant—­may pity the writer of these lines for his ignorance of the charming comforts, as yet unborn, which will render his physical condition so delightful.  To thee, oh, future reader, I am what the Gipsy is to me!  Wait, my dear boy of the Future—­wait—­till you get to heaven!