Throughout that summer night, when all were sleeping, save two romantic girls, she unfolded to me the secrets of her tribe, and a mine of mysteries learned from a Bohemian _Maugrabee_. She told me how, and why, the Druids, when the moon was six days old, cut the _misseltoe_ with a golden knife; how the _vervain_ was gathered with the left hand, at the rising of the dog-star; and the _lunaria_ was valueless, if not picked by moonlight; how the _roan-wood_, and the _Banyan seedling_, and the four-leaved _shamrock_, bore a charm in their tender leaves against every ill of life. In nature, she said, there is no bane without its antidote, were the intellect of man ripe for its discovery. There are corals and green jaspers, carved into the forms of dragons and lizards, hung round an infant’s neck, for the cure of an ague; the crimson-spotted _heliotropium_, to staunch a flow of blood; a wrapper of scarlet-cloth, to mitigate the virulence of small-pox; the blue-flannel, _nine times_ _dyed_, to allay the pains of rheumatism; and the magic word _Abracadabra_, to sooth the disorders of a nerve. And, above all, that wondrous _weapon-salve of sympathy_, which once healed on the instant the wound of Ulysses, and that which the dainty Ariel gave to Miranda, to charm Hippolito to life and health; and that with which the lady of Branxholme _salved_ the broken lance, when William of Deloraine was healed. It will be long ere from my memory fade this vision of Charlotte Stanley. In pity, Evelyn, leave me this one romance of my young life,—the sheet and taper, nay, the ducking-stool for the witch, if you will, but deign to bestow one smile upon the gipsies. Remember the story of the Sibylline Tables. If Sextus Tarquin had not frowned on the _Roman_ gipsy, she had not burned six of those precious volumes, which, from the massive cabinets of stone made to enclose the three that were preserved, prove that the Roman thought them priceless. One smile, Evelyn, for my sibyl. EV. Not in memory of the Sibylline Tables, but for your own sake, dear Castaly. Although the innocence of your nut-brown sibyl is not so clear, and I am somewhat jealous, too, of that _white magic_ of hers, which hath won the belief of so many minds the reverse of illiterate, who, from the Chaldean even to Bacon and William Lilly, have spurned philosophy, and even divinity, and pinned their faith upon a gipsy’s sleeve, and doted on the inspiration of an astrologer. IDA. Forgetful, it would seem, that the wicked king of Babylon found the devout Daniel, and Hananiah, and Michael, and Azariah, _ten times better_ than all his magi and astrologers.