One day I took the book from the shelves and then hurled it across the room.  Stumbling over it some days after this, a spasm of ungovernable rage came upon me, for terribly was my blood struggling with Fenella Stanley and Philip Aylwin, and thousands of ancestors, Romany and Gorgio, who for ages upon ages had been shaping my destiny.  I began to tear out the leaves and throw them on the fire.  But suddenly I perceived the leaves to be covered with marginalia in my father’s manuscript, and with references to Fenella Stanley’s letters—­letters which my father seemed to have studied as deeply as though they were the writings of a great philosopher instead of the scribblings of an ignorant Gypsy.  My eye had caught certain written words which caused me to clutch at the sheets still burning on the fire.  Too late!—­I grasped nothing save a little paper-ash.  Then I turned to the pages still left in my hand, and read these words of my father’s: 

’These marginalia are written for the eyes of my dear son, into whose hands this copy of my book will come.  Until he gave me his promise to bury the amulet with me, I felt alone in the world.  But even he failed to understand what he called “my superstition.”  He did not know that by perpetually feeling on my bosom the facets of the beloved jewel which had long lain warm upon hers—­the cross which had received the last kiss from her lips—­I had been able to focus all the scattered rays of thought—­I had been able to vitalise memory till it became an actual presence.  He did not know that out of my sorrow had been born at last a strange kind of happiness—­the happiness that springs from loving a memory—­living with a memory—­till it becomes a presence—­an objective reality.  He did not know that, by holding her continually in my thoughts, by means of the amulet, I achieved at last the miracle described by the Hindoo poets—­the miracle of reshaping from the undulations of “the three regions of the universe the remembered object by the all-creative magic of love!"’

Then followed some translations from the Kumara-sambhava and other Sanscrit poems, and then the well-known passage in Lucretius about dreams, and then a pathetic account of the visions called up within him by the sensation caused by the lacerations of the facets of the cherished amulet upon his bosom—­visions something akin, as I imagine, to those experienced by convulsionnaires.  And then after all this learning came references to poor ignorant Fenella Stanley’s letters and extracts from them.

In one of these extracts I was startled to come upon the now familiar word ‘crwth.’

’De Welch fok ses as de livin mullos only follow the crwth on Snowdon wen it is playde by a Welch Chavi, but dat is all a lie.  Dey follows the crwth when a Romany Chi plays it as I nows very wel, but de chavi wot play on the crwth, shee must love the living mullo she want for to come, and de living mullo must love her.’