{26} For if you turn up a little the two arms of a cross, you change the
emblem of suffering and innocence at once into one of murder--just as
ever so little a deviation from goodness will lead you, my dear boy, into
any amount of devilry.

And that the unfailing lucid flash of humour may not be wanting, there
lightens on my mind the memory of _The Mysterious Pitchfork_--a German
satirical play which made a sensation in its time--and Herlossohn in his
romance of _Der Letzte Taborit_ (which helped George Sand amazingly in
Consuelo), makes a Gipsy chieftain appear in a wonderfully puzzling light
by brandishing, in fierce midnight dignity, this agricultural parody on
Neptune's weapon, which brings me nicely around to my Gipsies again.

If I said nothing to the inmates of the cottage of all that the _trushul_
or cross trident suggested, still less did I vex their souls with the
mystic possible meaning of the antique _patteran_ or sign which I had
drawn. For it has, I opine, a deep meaning, which as one who knew
Creuzer of old, I have a right to set forth. Briefly, then, and without
encumbering my book with masses of authority, let me state that in all
early lore, the _road_ is a symbol of life; Christ himself having used it
in this sense. Cross roads were peculiarly meaning-full as indicating
the meet-of life with life, of good with evil, a faith of which abundant
traces are preserved in the fact that until the present generation
suicides were buried at them, and magical rites and diabolic incantations
are supposed to be most successful when practised in such places. The
English _path_, the Gipsy patteran, the Rommany-Hindu _pat_, a foot, and
the Hindu _panth_, a road, all meet in the Sanscrit _path_, which was the
original parting of the ways. Now the _patteran_ which I have drawn,
like the Koua of the Chinese or the mystical _Swastika_ of the Buddhists,
embraces the long line of life, or of the infinite and the short, or