“Years went by, and at last my uncle fell ill and died. Then my own parents took care of the little gell, and they changed her name to Rodi, for they couldn’t abide to hear the name Flower o’ May no more; it reminded ’em too sadly of them as had gone.”
On arising from my couch next morning, it was a pleasure to find that the air was moderately quiet, and patches of blue were showing between the rolling clouds. Breakfast over, my friends showed me round their garden gay with flowering bulbs. Gypsy-like, they had numerous pets—a pair of long-eared owls, a jackdaw, a goldfinch, some dainty bantams, and two or three pheasants in a wired poultry-run. Now the Gypsies came as far as the highway to see me off. Tender leaves and twigs strewed the road, as I mounted my bicycle, and after pedalling through several villages, the roofs of King’s Lynn began to appear ahead. A turn in the road at last brought me to a bridge spanning the broad river Ouse discoloured by flood-water. In a yard of the tavern just across the river, the chimneys of several Gypsy vans were to be seen. I therefore dismounted to make inquiries. Sunning himself on a bench outside the inn, sat a tall Gypsy man emptying a mug of Norfolk ale.
“Sâ shan, baw?” (How do, mate?) said I, sitting down beside him. He turned out to be one of the Kilthorpes, and his pals in the yard were Coopers from London.
An hour or two later, as I was loitering at a street corner in Lynn, I observed not far away a two-wheeled hooded cart drawn by a tired horse. From under a dark archway they emerged, and, coming into the light, I noticed an old woman under the hood smoking a pipe, and just then, from behind the cart stepped a sweep, who disappeared into a coal-yard, carrying a sack in his hand. Following him, I heard him say—
“Half a hundred-weight, missis.” A burly woman, having weighed out the coal, poured it into the sack—a bottomless receptacle—and the black lumps were scattered about the floor.
“Muk man peser” (Let me pay), said I, from behind the sweep. Whereupon the grimy old fellow looked round with an amazed stare.
“Pariko tuti, rai” (Thank you, sir), he stammered out, and, producing a piece of string, he tied the sack bottom securely, and the two of us picked up the littered coal.
“Where are you living?” I asked.
“Pawdel the pâni” (Across the water) “in West Lynn. We’ve been away for three months, and we’re going round to our house now. Come across to-night. Anybody will tell you where Old Stivven lives.”
When the yellow street-lamps were twinkling in the dusk, I groped my way down a long dark passage, and at the foot of a flight of slippery wet steps, found a black coble moored. For ten minutes or so I waited till a man in a jersey appeared and rowed me across the broad, rolling Ouse. At the “White Swan” inn I made inquiry for my sweep, and was given an address, and discovered a sweep, but, alas, he wasn’t my man at all, and I began to think Old Stephen had tricked me. But now I was given another address, where I found my man and his wife in their living-room, amid a spread of blankets and bedding airing in front of a bright fire. For a while we talked, and then at the sweep’s suggestion we moved across to the “White Swan.”