telling it."

"If so," quoth the youth, "I shall conceive your satisfying my request
a still greater favour than those you have already bestowed upon me."

The gypsy relaxed his pace into an indolent saunter, as he commenced:--

"The first scene that I remember was similar to that which you
witnessed last night. The savage tent, and the green moor; the fagot
blaze; the eternal pot, with its hissing note of preparation; the old
dame who tended it, and the ragged urchins who learned from its
contents the first reward of theft and the earliest temptation to it,
--all these are blended into agreeable confusion as the primal
impressions of my childhood. The woman who nurtured me as my mother
was rather capricious than kind, and my infancy passed away, like that
of more favoured scions of fortune, in alternate chastisement and
caresses. In good truth, Kinching Meg had the shrillest voice and the
heaviest hand of the whole crew; and I cannot complain of injustice,
since she treated me no worse than the rest. Notwithstanding the
irregularity of my education, I grew up strong and healthy, and my
reputed mother had taught me so much fear for herself that she left me
none for anything else; accordingly, I became bold, reckless, and
adventurous, and at the age of thirteen was as thorough a reprobate as
the tribe could desire. At that time a singular change befell me: we
(that is, my mother and myself) were begging not many miles hence at
the door of a rich man's house in which the mistress lay on her death-
bed. That mistress was my real mother, from whom Meg had stolen me in
the first year of existence. Whether it was through the fear of
conscience or the hope of reward, no sooner had Meg learnt the
dangerous state of my poor mother, the constant grief, which they said