Benedick’s.  Love-making and Armenian do not go together, and in the colloquy that ensued, Belle could not feel assured that the man who proposed to conjugate the verb “to love” in Armenian, was master of his intentions in plain English.  It was even so.  The man of tongues lacked speech wherewith to make manifest his passion; the vocabulary of the word-master was insufficient to convince the workhouse girl of one of the plainest meanings a man can well have.  From the banter of the man of learning the queen of the dingle sought refuge in a precipitate flight.  Almost simultaneously the word-master, albeit with reluctance, decided that it was high time to give over his “mocking and scoffing.”  When he returned with this resolve to the dingle, Isopel Berners had quitted it, never to return.

Yet ever and anon that splendid and pathetic figure will cross the sky line of his mental vision—­and of ours.  “Then the image of Isopel Berners came into my mind,” and the thought “how I had lost her for ever, and how happy I might have been with her in the New World.”

DWELLERS IN THE DINGLE, AND SOME OTHERS.

MEN.

LAVENGRO, the autobiographer, scholar and philologist (Lavengro=_word-master_); known among the road-faring folk as the Romany rye, or young squire turned gypsy.

JASPER PETULENGRO, a Romany kral or tribal chief, horse-dealer and blacksmith (petulengro=_lord of the horseshoe_). “The Gypsy.”

FRASER, a popish emissary or propagandist, known as the “man in black.” “The Priest.”

TAWNO CHIKNO, the little one, so called on account of his immense size; the “Antinous of the dusky people;” a great horseman and JASPER’S brother-in-law.

SYLVESTER, another brother-in-law, an ill-conditioned fellow, “the Lazarus of the Romany tribe.”

BLACK or BLAZING JOHN BOSVILLE (Anselo Herne), “the flaming tinman” a “half-in-half” itinerant tinker and bruiser.

CATCHPOLE, the landlord of a small inn, two miles from the Dingle, and not far from Willenhall in Staffordshire.

MR. HUNTER, a radical, who wears a snuff-coloured coat and frequents the inn above named.

A postilion, whose headquarters are The Swan, Stafford.

WOMEN.

ISOPEL or BELLE BERNERS, the beauteous queen of the Dingle.

GREY MOLL, wife of BOSVILLE, the flying tinker.

A niece of the landlord of the inn.

The three daughters of Mrs. Herne:—­

PAKOMOVNA, (MRS.) PETULENGRO,

MIKAILIA, (MRS.) CHIKNO.

URSULA, widow of LAUNCELOT LOVELL, who subsequently marries
SYLVESTER.