"Good-evening, mother," she said.
The old woman raised her gaunt face with a start, and cried fiercely,
"Begone with you! Begone!" and then bent it again upon her hands,
muttering, "There are plenty of hedges and ditches too good for your
lot, without their coming to worrit us in our wood."
The gipsy girl knelt quietly by the fire, and stirred up the embers.
"What is the matter, mother?" she said. "We've only just come, and when
I heard that Tinker George and his mother were in the wood, I started to
find you. 'You makes too free with the tinkers,' says my brother's
wife. 'I goes to see my mother,' says I, 'who nursed me through a
sickness, my real mother being dead, and my own people wanting to bury
me through my not being able to speak or move, and their wanting to get
to the Bartelmy Fair.' I never forget, mother; have you forgotten me,
that you drives me away for bidding you good-day?"
"Good days are over for me," moaned the old woman. "Begone, I say! Don't
let me see or hear any that belongs to Black Basil, or it may be the
worse for them."
("The tinker-mother whines very nastily," said Mrs. Hedgehog. "If I were
the young woman, I should bite her."
"Hush!" I answered, "she is speaking.
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