When the ladies had all been instructed as to their future, my friend, who had been in the East, must needs have his destiny made known unto him. He did not believe in this sort of thing, you know,—of course not. But he had lived a long time among Orientals, and he just happened to wish to know how certain speculations would fall out, and he loves, above all things, a lark, or anything out of the common. So he went in. And when alone with the sybil, she began to talk to him in Romany.
“Oh, I say, now, old lady, stow that!” he exclaimed. “I don’t understand you.”
“You don’t understand me!” exclaimed the fortune-teller. “Perhaps you didn’t understand your own mother when she talked Romany to you. What’s the use of your tryin’ to make yourself out a Gorgio
to me? Don’t I know our people? Didn’t your friend there talk Romanes? Isn’t he all Romaneskas? And didn’t I hear you with my own ears count up to ten in Romany? And now, after that, you would deny your own blood and people! Yes, you’ve dwelt in Gorgines so long that you think your eyes are blue and your hair is yellow, my son, and you have been far over the sea; but wherever you went you knew Romanes, if you don’t know your own color. But you shall hear your fortune. There is lead in the mines and silver in the lead, and wealth for him who is to win it, and that will be a dark man who has been nine times over the sea, and eaten his bread under the black tents, and been three times near death, once from a horse, and once from a man, and once through a woman. And you will know something you don’t know now before a month is over, and something will be found that is now hidden, and has been hidden since the world was made. And there’s a good fortune coming to the man it was made for, before the oldest tree that’s a-growing was a seed, and that’s a man as knows how to count Romanes up to ten, and many a more thing beside that, that he’s learned beyond the great water.”
And so we went our ways, the harp and violin sounds growing fainter as we receded, till they were like the buzzing of bees in drying clover, and the twilight grew rosier brown. I never met Mat Woods again, though I often heard of his fame as a fiddler. Whether my Anglo-Indian friend found the fortune so vaguely predicted is to me as yet unknown. But I believe that the prediction encouraged him. That there are evils in palmistry, and sin in card-drawing, and iniquity in coffee-grounding, and vice in all the
planets, is established by statute, and yet withal I incline to believe that the art of prediction cheers up many a despondent soul, and does some little good, even as good ale, despite the wickedness of drinking, makes some hearts merry and others stronger. If there are foolish maids who have had their heads turned by being told of coming noblemen and prospective swells, who loved the ground they trod on, and were waiting to woo and win and wed, and if the same maidens herein described have thereby, in the manner set forth, been led by the aforesaid devices unto their great injury, as written in the above indictment, it may also per contra and on the other hand be pleaded that divers girls, to wit, those who believe in prediction, have, by encouragement and hope to them held out of legally marrying sundry young men of good estate, been induced to behave better than they would otherwise have done, and led by this hope have acted more morally than was their wont, and thereby lifted themselves above the lowly state of vulgarity, and even of vice, in which they would otherwise have groveled, hoveled, or cottaged. And there have been men who, cherishing in their hearts a prediction, or, what amounts to the same thing, a conviction, or a set fancy, have persevered in hope until the hope was realized. You, O Christian, who believe in a millennium, you, O Jew, who expect a Messiah, and await the fulfillment of your dukkerin, are both in the right, for both will come true when you make them do so.
II. THE PIOUS WASHERWOMAN.
There is not much in life pleasanter than a long ramble on the road in leaf-green, sun-gold summer. Then it is Nature’s merry-time, when fowls in woods them maken blithe, and the crow preaches from the fence to his friends afield, and the honeysuckle winketh to the wild rose in the hedge when she is wooed by the little buzzy bee. In such times it is good for the heart to wander over the hills and far away, into haunts known of old, where perhaps some semi-Saxon church nestles in a hollow behind a hill, where grass o’ergrows each mouldering tomb, and the brook, as it ripples by in a darksome aldered hollow, speaks in a language which man knows no more, but which is answered in the same forgotten tongue by the thousand-year yew as it rustles in the breeze. And when there are Runic stones in this garden of God, where He raises souls, I often fancy that this old dialect is written in their rhythmic lines. The yew-trees were planted by law, lang-syne, to yield bows to the realm, and now archery is dead and Martini-Henry has taken its place, but the yews still live, and the Runic fine art of the twisted lines on the tombs, after a thousand years’ sleep, is beginning to revive. Every thing at such a time speaks of joy and resurrection—tree and tomb and bird and flower and bee.
These are all memories of a walk from the town
of Aberystwith, in Wales, which walk leads by an ancient church, in the soul garden of which are two Runic cross tombstones. One day I went farther afield to a more ancient shrine, on the top of a high mountain. This was to the summit of Cader Idris, sixteen miles off. On this summit there is a Druidical circle, of which the stones, themselves to ruin grown, are strange and death-like old. Legend says that this is the burial-place of Taliesin, the first of Welsh bards, the primeval poet of Celtic time. Whoever sleeps on the grave will awake either a madman or a poet, or is at any rate unsafe to become one or the other. I went, with two friends, afoot on this little pilgrimage. Both were professors at one of the great universities. The elder is a gentleman of great benevolence, learning, and gentleness; the other, a younger man, has been well polished and sharpened by travel in many lands. It is rumored that he has preached Islam in a mosque unto the Moslem even unto taking up a collection, which is the final test of the faith which reaches forth into a bright eternity. That he can be, as I have elsewhere noted, a Persian unto Persians, and a Romany among Roms, and a professional among the hanky-pankorites, is likewise on the cards, as surely as that he knows the roads and all the devices and little games of them that dwell thereon. Though elegant enough in his court dress and rapier when he kisses the hand of our sovereign lady the queen, he appears such an abandoned rough when he goes a-fishing that the innocent and guileless gypsies, little suspecting that a rye lies perdu in his wrap-rascal, will then confide in him as if he and in-doors had never been acquainted.