But behind it all, when the inner life came out, was the wild Rommany and the witch-aura—­the fierce spirit of social exile from the world in which they lived (the true secret of all the witch-life of old), and the joyous consciousness of a secret tongue and hidden ways.  To those who walk in the darkness of the dream, let them go as deep and as windingly as they will, and into the grimmest gloom of goblin-land, there will never be wanting flashes of light, though they be gleams diavoline, corpse-candlelights, elfin sparkles, and the unearthly blue lume of the eyes of silent night-hags wandering slow.  In the forgotten grave of the sorcerer burns steadily through long centuries the Rosicrucian lamp, and even to him whose eyes are closed, sparkle, on pressure, phosphorescent rings.  So there was Gipsy laughter; and the ancient wicca and Vala flashed out into that sky-rocketty joyousness and Catherine-wheel gaiety, which at eighty or ninety, in a woman, vividly reminds one of the Sabbat on the Brocken, of the ointment, and all things terrible and unearthly and forbidden.

I do not suppose that there are many people who can feel or understand that among the fearfully dirty dwellers in tents and caravans, cock-shysters and dealers in dogs of doubtful character, there can be anything strange, and quaint, and deeply tinged with the spirit of which I have spoken.  As well might one attempt to persuade the twenty-stone half-illiterate and wholly old-fashioned rural magistrate of the last century that the poor devil of a hen-stealing Gipsy dragged before him knew that which would send thrills of joy through the most learned philologist in Europe, and cause the great band of scholars to sing for joy.  Life, to most of us, is nothing without its humour; and to me a whilome German student illustrating his military marauding by phrases from Fichte, or my friend Pauno the Rommany urging me with words to be found in the Mahabahrata and Hafiz to buy a terrier, is a charming experience.

I believe that my imagination has neither been led nor driven, when it has so invariably, in my conversing with Gipsy women, recalled Faust, and all I have ever read in Wierus, Bodinus, Bekker, Mather, or Glanvil, of the sorceress and sortilega.  And certainly on this earth I never met with such a perfect replica of Old Mother Baubo, the mother of all the witches, as I once encountered at a certain race.  Swarthy, black-eyed, stout, half-centuried, fiercely cunning, and immoderately sensual, her first salutation was expressed in a phrase such as a Corinthian soul might be greeted with on entering that portion of the after-world devoted to the fastest of the fair.  With her came a tall, lithe, younger sorceress; and verily the giant fat sow for her majesty, and the broom for the attendant, were all that was wanting.