‘No, I prefer to be alone:  good-night,’ said I.

‘Why!’ he exclaimed, ‘where ha’ you been t’ learn language?  Halloa !’

‘Please, leave me alone; it’s my intention to go to sleep,’ I said, vexed at having to conciliate him; he had a big stick.

‘Oho!’ went the beggar.  Then he recommenced: 

’Tell me you’ve stole nothing in your life!  You’ve stole a gentleman’s tongue, I knows the ring o’ that.  How comes you out here?  Who’s your mate there down below?  Now, see, I’m going to lift my stick.’

At these menacing words the girl jumped out of the blanket, and I called to him that I would rouse the farmer.

‘Why . . . because I’m goin’ to knock down a apple or two on your head?’ he inquired, in a tone of reproach.  ’It’s a young woman you’ve got there, eh?  Well, odd grows odder, like the man who turned three shillings into five.  Now, you gi’ me a lie under your blanket, I ’ll knock down a apple apiece.  If ever you’ve tasted gin, you ’ll say a apple at night’s a cordial, though it don’t intoxicate.’

The girl whispered in my ear, ‘He’s lame as ducks.’  Her meaning seized me at once; we both sprang out of the ditch and ran, dragging our blanket behind us.  He pursued, but we eluded him, and dropped on a quiet sleeping-place among furzes.  Next morning, when we took the blanket to the farm-house, we heard that the old wretch had traduced our characters, and got a breakfast through charging us with the robbery of the apple-tree.  I proved our innocence to the farmer’s wife by putting down a shilling.  The sight of it satisfied her.  She combed my hair, brought me a bowl of water and a towel, and then gave us a bowl of milk and bread, and dismissed us, telling me I had a fair face and dare-devil written on it:  as for the girl, she said of her that she knew gipsies at a glance, and what God Almighty made them for there was no guessing.  This set me thinking all through the day, ‘What can they have been made for?’ I bought a red scarf for the girl, and other things she fixed her eyes on, but I lost a great deal of my feeling of fellowship with her.  ‘I dare say they were made for fun,’ I thought, when people laughed at us now, and I laughed also.

I had a day of rollicking laughter, puzzling the girl, who could only grin two or three seconds at a time, and then stared like a dog that waits for his master to send him off again running, the corners of her mouth twitching for me to laugh or speak, exactly as a dog might wag his tail.  I studied her in the light of a harmless sort of unaccountable creature; witness at any rate for the fact that I had escaped from school.