the thought that I was a very queer boy displaced his image.  I could not but be a very queer boy, such a lot of things happened to me.  Suppose I joined the gipsies?  My companion wished me to.  She had brothers, horse-dealers, beautiful fiddlers.  Suppose I learnt the fiddle?  Suppose I learnt their language and went about with them and became king of the gipsies?  My companion shook her head; she could not encourage this ambitious idea because she had never heard of a king of the gipsies or a queen either.  ‘We fool people,’ she said, and offended me, for our school believed in a gipsy king, and one fellow, Hackman, used to sing a song of a gipsy king; and it was as much as to say that my schoolfellows were fools, every one of them.  I accused her of telling lies.  She grinned angrily.  ’I don’t tell ’em to friends,’ she said.  We had a quarrel.  The truth was, I was enraged at the sweeping out of my prospects of rising to distinction among the gipsies.  After breakfast at an inn, where a waiter laughed at us to our faces, and we fed scowling, shy, and hungry, we had another quarrel.  I informed her of my opinion that gipsies could not tell fortunes.

’They can, and you come to my mother and my aunt, and see if they can’t tell your fortune,’ said she, in a fury.

‘Yes, and that’s how they fool people,’ said I. I enjoyed seeing the flash of her teeth.  But my daring of her to look me in the eyes and swear on her oath she believed the fortunes true ones, sent her into a fit of sullenness.

‘Go along, you nasty little fellow, your shadow isn’t half a yard,’ she said, and I could smile at that; my shadow stretched half across the road.  We had a quarrelsome day wherever we went; rarely walking close together till nightfall, when she edged up to my hand, with, ’I say, I’ll keep you warm to-night, I will.’  She hugged me almost too tight, but it was warm and social, and helped to the triumph of a feeling I had that nothing made me regret running away from Rippenger’s school.

An adventure befell us in the night.  A farmer’s wife, whom we asked for a drink of water after dark, lent us an old blanket to cover us in a dry ditch on receiving our promise not to rob the orchard.  An old beggar came limping by us, and wanted to share our covering.  My companion sank right under the blanket to peer at him through one of its holes.  He stood enormous above me in the moonlight, like an apparition touching earth and sky.

‘Cold, cold,’ he whined:  ’there’s ne’er a worse off but there’s a better off.  Young un!’ His words dispersed the fancy that he was something horrible, or else my father in disguise going to throw off his rags, and shine, and say he had found me.  ‘Are ye one, or are ye two?’ he asked.

I replied that we were two.

‘Then I’ll come and lie in the middle,’ said he.

‘You can’t; there’s no room,’ I sang out.

‘Lord,’ said he, ‘there’s room for any reckoning o’ empty stomachs in a ditch.’