My companion related her history.

She belonged to a Hampshire gipsy tribe, and had been on a visit to a relative down in the East counties, who died on the road, leaving her to be brought home by these tramps: she called them mumpers, and made faces when she spoke of them.

Gipsies, she said, were a different sort: gipsies camped in gentlemen's parks; gipsies, horses, fiddles, and the wide world--that was what she liked.

The wide world she described as a heath, where you looked and never saw the end of it I let her talk on.

For me to talk of my affairs to a girl without bonnet and boots would have been absurd.