Everything in the cottage was scrupulously neat--there was even an approach to style.

The furniture and ornaments were superior to those found in common peasant houses.

There was a large and beautifully-bound photograph album.

I found that the family could read and write--the daughter received and read a note, and one of the sons knew who and what Mr Robert Browning was.
But behind it all, when the inner life came out, was the wild Rommany and the witch-_aura_--the fierce spirit of social exile from the world in which they lived (the true secret of all the witch-life of old), and the joyous consciousness of a secret tongue and hidden ways.

To those who walk in the darkness of the dream, let them go as deep and as windingly as they will, and into the grimmest gloom of goblin-land, there will never be wanting flashes of light, though they be gleams diavoline, corpse-candlelights, elfin sparkles, and the unearthly blue lume of the eyes of silent night-hags wandering slow.