So absorbing had been the gipsy talk that I am afraid the waiting luncheon was spoilt. The little luncheon party was composed of fervent admirers of Sir Walter Scott—bigoted admirers, I fear, some of our present-day critics would have dubbed us; and it chanced that we all agreed in pronouncing ‘Guy Mannering’ to be the most fascinating of all the Wizard’s work. Of course Meg Merrilies became at once the centre of the talk. One contended that, great as Meg was as a woman, she was as a gipsy a failure; in short, that Scott’s idea of the Scottish gipsy woman was conventional—a fancy portrait in which are depicted some of the loftiest characteristics of the Highland woman rather than of the Scottish gipsy. The true romany chi can be quite as noble as Meg Merrilies, said one, but great in a different way. From Meg Merrilies the talk naturally turned upon Jane Gordon of Kirk Yetholm, Meg’s prototype, who, when an old woman, was ducked to death in the River Eden at Carlisle. Then came the subject of Kirk Yetholm itself, the famous headquarters of the Scotch Romanies; and after this it naturally turned to Kirk Yetholm’s most famous inhabitant, old Will Faas, the gipsy king, whose corpse was escorted to Yetholm by three hundred and more donkeys. And upon all these subjects Groome’s knowledge was like an inexhaustible fountain; or rather it was like a tap, ready to supply any amount of lore when called upon to do so. But it was not merely upon Romany subjects that Groome found points of sympathy at The Pines during that first luncheon; there was that other subject before mentioned, Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyàm. We, a handful of Omarians of those antediluvian days, were perhaps all the more intense in our cult because we believed it to be esoteric. And here was a guest who had been brought into actual personal contact with the wonderful old Fitz. As a child of eight he had seen him—talked with him—been patted on the head by him. Groome’s father, the Archdeacon of Suffolk, was one of FitzGerald’s most intimate friends. This was at once a delightful and a powerful link between Frank Groome and those at the luncheon table; and when he heard, as he soon did, the toast to “Omar Khayyàm,” none drank that toast with more gusto than he. The fact is, as the Romanies say, that true friendship, like true love, is apt to begin at first sight. But I must stop. Frequently when the “Tarno Rye” came to England his headquarters were at The Pines. Many and delightful were the strolls he and I had together. One day we went to hear a gipsy band supposed to be composed of Roumelian gipsies. After we had listened to several well-executed things Groome sauntered up to one of the performers and spoke to him in Roumelian Romany. The man, although he did not understand Groome, knew that he was speaking Romany of some kind, and began speaking in Hungarian Romany, and was at once responded to by Groome in that variety of the Romany tongue.