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.

We loitered half the morning round a cricketers’ booth in a field, where there was moderately good cricketing.  The people thought it of first-rate quality.  I told them I knew a fellow who could bowl out either eleven in an hour and a half.  One of the men frightened me by saying, ’By Gearge!  I’ll in with you into a gig, and off with you after that ther’ faller.’  He pretended to mean it, and started up.  I watched him without flinching.  He remarked that if I ’had not cut my lucky from school, and tossed my cap for a free life, he was ——­’ whatever may be expressed by a slap on the thigh.  We played a single-wicket side game, he giving me six runs, and crestfallen he was to find himself beaten; but, as I let him know, one who had bowled to Heriot for hours and stood against Saddlebank’s bowling, was a tough customer, never mind his age.