I liked the idea of the grand city of the world owing its origin to a people who had been in the habit of carrying their houses in their carts.

Why, after all, should not the Romans of history be a branch of these Romans?
There were several points of similarity between them; if Roman matrons were chaste, both men and women were thieves.

Old Rome was the thief of the world; yet still there were difficulties to be removed before I could persuade myself that the old Romans and my Romans were identical; and in trying to remove these difficulties, I felt my brain once more beginning to turn, and in haste took up another subject of meditation, and that was the patteran, and what Ursula had told me about it.
I had always entertained a strange interest for that sign by which in their wanderings the Romanese gave to those of their people who came behind intimation as to the direction which they took; but it now inspired me with greater interest than ever,--now that I had learnt that the proper meaning of it was the leaves of trees.

I had, as I had said in my dialogue with Ursula, been very eager to learn the word for leaf in the Romanian language, but had never learnt it till this day; so patteran signified leaf of a tree; and no one at present knew that but myself and Ursula, who had learnt it from Mrs.Herne, the last, it was said, of the old stock; and then I thought what strange people the gypsies must have been in the old time.

They were sufficiently strange at present, but they must have been far stranger of old; they must have been a more peculiar people--their language must have been more perfect--and they must have had a greater stock of strange secrets.