great-grandfather, who had taught her to write: nothing apparently
could have taught her to spell. It was written during a short stay
she was making away from him in North Wales. It described in the
simplest (and often the most uncouth) words that Nature-ecstasy which
the Romanies seem to feel in the woodlands. It came upon me like a
revelation, for it was the first time I had ever seen embodied in
words the sensations which used to come to me in Graylingham Wood or
on the river that ran through it. After long basking among the
cowslips, or beneath the whispering branches of an elm, whose shade I
was robbing from the staring cows around, or lying on my hack in a
boat on the river, listening to the birds and the insect hum and all
the magic music of summer in the woodlands, I used all at once to
feel as though the hand of a great enchantress were being waved
before me and around me. The wheels of thought would stop; all the
senses would melt into one, and I would float on a tide of
unspeakable joy, a tide whose waves were waves neither of colour, nor
perfume, nor melody, but new waters born of the mixing of these; and
through a language deeper than words and deeper than thoughts, I
would seem carried at last close to an actual consciousness--a
consciousness which, to my childish dreams, seemed drawing me close
to the bosom of a mother whose face would brighten into that of
Feuella.

My father lived upon moderate means in the little seaside town of
Raxton. My mother was his second wife, a distant cousin of the same
name. She was not one of the 'Proud Aylwins,' and yet she must have
had more pride in her heart than all the 'Proud Aylwins' put
together. Her feeling in relation to the strain of Gypsy blood in the
family into which she had married was that of positive terror. She
associated the word 'Gypsy' with everything that is wild, passionate,