‘But why?’ I asked.

’There’s nobody can’t hurt you and them you’re fond on as your own breed can.  As my poor mammy used to say, “For good or for ill you must dig deep to bury your daddy.”  But you know, brother, the wust o’ this job is that it’s a trushul as has been stole.’

‘A trushul?’

‘What you call a cross.  There’s nothin’ in the world so strong for cussin’ and blessin’ as a trushul, unless the stars shinin’ in the river or the hand in the clouds is as strong.  Why, I tell you there’s nothin’ a trushul can’t do, whether it’s curin’ a man as is bit by a sap, or wipin’ the very rainbow out o’ the sky by jist layin’ two sticks crossways, or even curin’ the cramp in your legs by jist settin’ your shoes crossways; there’s nothin’ for good or bad a trushul can’t do if it likes.  Hav’n’t you never heer’d o’ the dukkeripen o’ the trushul shinin’ in the sunset sky when the light o’ the sinkin’ sun shoots up behind a bar o’ clouds an’ makes a kind o fiery cross?  But to go and steal a trushul out of a dead man’s tomb—­why, it’s no wonder as the Wynnes is cussed, feyther and child.’

I could not have tolerated this prattle about Gypsy superstitions had I not observed that through it all the Gypsy was on the qui vive, looking for the traces of her path that Winifred had unconsciously left behind her.  Had the Gypsy been following the trail with the silence of an American Indian, she could not have worked more carefully than she was now working while her tongue went rattling on.  I afterwards found this to be a characteristic of her race, as I afterwards found that what is called the long sight of the Gypsies (as displayed in the following of the patrin [Footnote:  Trail]) is not long sight at all, but is the result of a peculiar faculty the Gypsies have of observing more closely than Gorgios do everything that meets their eyes in the woods and on the hills and along the roads.  When we reached the spot indicated by the Gypsy as being Winifred’s haunt, the ledge where she was in the habit of coming for her imaginary interviews with the ‘Prince of the Mist,’ we did not stay there, but for a time still followed the path, which from this point became rougher and rougher, alongside deep precipices and chasms.  Every now and then she would stop on a ledge of rock, and, without staying her prattle for a moment, stoop down and examine the earth with eyes that would not have missed the footprint of a rat.  When I saw her pause, as she sometimes would in the midst of her scrutiny, to gaze inquiringly down some gulf, which then seemed awful to my inexperienced eyes, but which later on in the day, when I came to see the tremendous chasms of that side of Snowdon, seemed insignificant enough, the circulation of my blood would seem to stop, and then rush again through my body more violently than before.  And while the ‘patrin-chase’ went on, and the morning grew brighter and brighter, the Gypsy’s lithe, catlike tread never faltered.  The rise and fall of her bosom were as regular and as calm as in the public-house.  Such agility and such staying power in a woman astonished me.  Finding no trace of Winnie, we returned to the little plateau by Knockers’ Llyn.