they sleep inside their wagons and I wish we had a wagon like that and drove round the country and lived in it."

"All right," said his father. "Stir your stumps."

They followed the path that led up over another little hill winding through clumps of hazel brush and a sparse growth of oak and beech. From the summit of this they could see the gypsy camp below them, in an open glade by the roadside. It was as the Wilbur twin had said: there were gayly-painted wagons—houses on wheels—and a campfire and tethered horses and the lolling gypsies themselves. About the outskirts loafed a dozen or so of the less socially eligible of Newbern. Above a fire at the camp centre a kettle simmered on its pothook, being stirred at this moment by a brown and aged crone in frivolous-patterned calico, who wore gold hoops in her ears and bangles at her neck and bracelets of silver on her arms—bejewelled, indeed, most unbecomingly for a person of her years.

The Wilbur twin would have lingered on the edge of the glade with other local visitors, a mere silent observer of this delightful life; he had not dreamed of being accepted as a social equal by such exalted beings. But his father stalked boldly through the outer ring of spectators to the camp's centre and genially hailed the aged woman, who, on first looking up from her cookery, held out a withered palm for the silver that should buy him secrets of his future.

But Dave Cowan merely preened his beautiful yellow moustache at her and said, "How's business, Mother?" Whereupon she saw that Dave was not a villager to be wheedled by her patter. She recognized him, indeed, as belonging like herself to the freemasonry of them that know men and cities, and she spoke to him as one human to another.

"Business been pretty rotten here," she said as she stirred   the kettle's contents. "Oh, we made two-three pretty good horse trades—nothing much. We go on to a bigger town to-morrow."

A male gypsy in corduroy trousers and scarlet sash and calico shirt open on his brown throat came to the fire now, and the Wilbur twin admiringly noted that his father greeted this rare being, too, as an equal. The gypsy held beneath an arm a trim young gamecock feathered in rich browns and reds, with a hint of black, and armed with needle-pointed spurs. He stroked the neck of the bird and sat on his haunches with Dave before the fire to discuss affairs of the road; for he, too, divined at a glance that 

 Prev. P 78/298 next