It was to be remarked that our entertainers were much better disposed toward us after supper than before. Their suspicion and reserve melted more and more, and instead of using the Romany language, ordered their conversation in ours, that we might take some profit of their intercourse. They all showed this amenable disposition with the exception of the old crone, who had supped only on tobacco, preferring her pipe to the lustier fare of the cauldron. She would have none of us. We could clearly see the expression of her lowering, tawny face, since she sat opposite to us, full in the glare of the fire. This indifference to us was more than passive. We discerned with some uneasiness that it amounted to positive dislike. She would stare at us whole minutes together, while a concentrated malignity came into her already sufficiently ugly face. She would then mutter incoherently under her breath. Once she spat venomously into the fire. At last, after staring at us longer and more resentfully than usual, she clutched a fellow who sat beside her fiercely by the arm. She talked to him with great energy, and ended with something that sounded of the nature of an imprecation. As she did so she shook her finger at our faces. Whatever her communication was, the man was much discomposed by it. He nodded, infused a certain malignity too in the look with which he regarded us, and then addressed several of his companions very much in the manner that the old woman had addressed him. Cynthia, who had observed these signs as keenly as I had, grew alarmed. Nor was this unreasonable in her, for such were the weight of the old crone's objections to us, whatever their nature, that before long they had spread to the whole community. Thus we soon found ourselves in the unpleasant position of being the cynosure of all their eyes, the objects at which their fingers were wagged, and against whom their passionate talk was directed. But we suffered from the additional misfortune of being unable to understand a single word, and were thus quite at a loss to know wherein we had offended. It was the man with the flute who presently enlightened us. Probably his devotion to music, one of the liberal arts, gave him a more humane cast than his brethren. Indeed at this moment he alone seemed friendly towards us. "Old Goody does not like the set o' ye," says he. "You will bring ill-luck upon us wandering folk, she thinks." "What does she object to in us?" "Nay," says he, "that is more than I can say. She is as full of prediction, whimsies, and foreboding as a dog-fox is of cunning. She has lived a long while, d'ye see, and can read the signs. She has forseen many a corpse, by looking at the moon. Many's the man-child she's brought into the world. And only last year when she heard the wind soughing through the branches, she told not only the day but the very hour that Jerry Boswell came to be hanged."