visited the office of my master at law, the respectable S. . ., who had the management of his property—­I remembered to have heard this worthy, with whom I occasionally held discourse, philosophic and profound, when he and I chanced to be alone together in the office, say that all first-rate thieves were sober, and of well-regulated morals, their bodily passions being kept in abeyance by their love of gain; but this axiom could scarcely hold good with respect to these women—­however thievish they might be, they did care for something besides gain:  they cared for their husbands.  If they did thieve, they merely thieved for their husbands; and though, perhaps, some of them were vain, they merely prized their beauty because it gave them favour in the eyes of their husbands.  Whatever the husbands were—­and Jasper had almost insinuated that the males occasionally allowed themselves some latitude—­they appeared to be as faithful to their husbands as the ancient Roman matrons were to theirs.  Roman matrons! and, after all, might not these be in reality Roman matrons?  They called themselves Romans; might not they be the descendants of the old Roman matrons?  Might not they be of the same blood as Lucretia?  And were not many of their strange names—­Lucretia amongst the rest—­handed down to them from old Rome?  It is true their language was not that of old Rome; it was not, however, altogether different from it.  After all, the ancient Romans might be a tribe of these people, who settled down and founded a village with the tilts of carts, which by degrees, and the influx of other people, became the grand city of the world.  I liked the idea of the grand city of the world owing its origin to a people who had been in the habit of carrying their houses in their carts.  Why, after all, should not the Romans of history be a branch of these Romans?  There were several points of similarity between them; if Roman matrons were chaste, both men and women were thieves.  Old Rome was the thief of the world; yet still there were difficulties to be removed before I could persuade myself that the old Romans and my Romans were identical; and in trying to remove these difficulties, I felt my brain once more beginning to turn, and in haste took up another subject of meditation, and that was the patteran, and what Ursula had told me about it.

I had always entertained a strange interest for that sign by which in their wanderings the Romanese gave to those of their people who came behind intimation as to the direction which they took; but it now inspired me with greater interest than ever,—­now that I had learned that the proper meaning of it was the leaves of trees.  I had, as I had said in my dialogue with Ursula, been very eager to learn the word for leaf in the Romanian language, but had never learned it till this day; so patteran signified leaf, the leaf of a tree; and no one at present knew that but myself and Ursula, who had learned it from Mrs.