passing the summer as an amateur vagrant, and had some 15 or 16 pounds in
his pocket, conceived the idea of buying the pony-cart, the implements
and the beat of the tinker, one Jack Slingsby, whose face he remembered
having seen some ten years before. "I want a home and work," he said to
the tinker. "As for a home, I suppose I can contrive to make a home out
of your tent and cart; and as for work, I must learn to be a tinker; it
would not be hard for one of my trade to be a tinker: what better can I
do?" "What about the naming tinman?" said the tinker. "Oh, don't be
afraid on my account," said the word-master: "if I were to meet him, I
could easily manage him one way or the other: I know all kinds of strange
words and names, and, as I told you before, I sometimes hit people when
they put me out."

He accordingly purchases Slingsby's property, and further invests in a
waggoner's frock. To the pony he gives the name of Ambrol, which
signifies in gypsy a pear. He spends a first night under the hedge in a
drizzling rain, and then spends two or three days in endeavouring to
teach himself the mysteries of his new trade. While living in this
solitary way he is detected by Mrs. Herne, an old gypsy woman, "one of
the hairy ones," as she terms herself, who carried "a good deal of
devil's tinder" about with her, and had a bitter grudge against the word-
master. She hated him for having wormed himself, as she fancied, into
the confidence of the gypsies and learned their language. She regarded
him further, as the cause of differences between herself and her sons-in-
law--as an apple of discord in the Romany camp. She employed her
grandchild, Leonora, to open relations in a friendly way with Lavengro,
and then to persuade him to eat of a "drabbed" of poisoned cake. Lavengro
was grievously sick, but was saved in the nick of time by the appearance
upon the scene of a Welsh preacher, Peter Williams, and his wife--two
good souls who wandered over all Wales and the greater part of England,