“See what I have brought you,” he cried. “Now make that into a mat, and I will take it out and sell it, and bring you back the money.”
The potter’s wife was amazed by his cleverness, but she knew that the gipsies had to live by their wits, and that teaches them to be sharp, so she sat down, and tried to weave the straw into a mat, as the gipsy boy had said.
At first she found it very hard to use, for it was coarse and brittle, and she thought she could make nothing of it. The lad sat beside her, and cut it into even lengths for her, and chose out the good pieces, and at last betwixt them it was done, and it looked quite a smart little mat, and the boy took it on his back and ran away with it to the village.
“A mat, a mat,” he cried, “who wants to buy a good straw mat to wipe their feet on when they are dirty, or for the cat to sit on by the fire, or to put over the fowl-house and keep it warm?”
At first all the people he met laughed at him, and said nobody wished to buy a mat at all. Then he turned into the alehouse. There were some men smoking and keeping themselves warm by the fire, and when the host saw him, and the mat over his shoulder, he said it was quite a well-made thing, and he would have it to lay down by his doorway for in-comers to tread on; and then one and another looked at it, and the boy told them where it came from, and said he could bring them plenty more straw mats and carpets, all as good or better, and so well worked that they would last almost forever; and presently one and another began to say that they would buy them, and when he had taken his money, the gipsy boy ran home well content.
So the potter’s wife sat all day weaving straw mats, and presently she got to do them so well, that from far and near the people sent to buy them of her. Then after a time she put patterns into them, made with red, and black, and white straws, but do what she could, the patterns always came out in the shape of a cup, and still she wept and grieved all day long. Then the gipsy lad said to her—
“What are you crying for now? You have plenty to eat and drink. Tell me why you are crying, and I will help you if I can, because you took my mother into your house to die, and buried her in your fine cloth like a princess.”
“I cry because my husband has gone a long way off,” said the potter’s wife, “and he doesn’t know that I love him, and he will never come back to me, for when he went away I hated him.”
“He will never know it if you don’t try to tell him,” said the gipsy boy. “You should tell it to everyone you meet, to all the birds of the air, and the wild animals too. That is what my mother told me to do, if I wanted to send news abroad. You should say it even to the winds, and write it in the sand, and on the earth, and on the leaves of the trees in case they blow about, for she said all things could pass on a secret, though none can keep one. And why don’t you weave it into your mats too? For the people who buy them take them far and near, and maybe he will see one, and know that you want him to come home again.”
Then the potter’s wife tried to weave her secret into her mats, and beside the pattern of the cup she wove a little verse—
“From the gipsy’s cup I drank for love,
From the gipsy’s cup I drank for hate,
But when she gave me a cup again
My love had gone and I drank too late.”
“Now,” cried the gipsy boy, “your husband may see it, and perhaps he will come home, and all will be well with us.”
But still the potter journeyed far into the world, and wherever he went he asked if any gipsy had been near there; and if there happened to be a gipsy camp in the neighbourhood, he went to it at once, and asked for a gipsy woman with red beads and gold chains in her hair, or for a gipsy man who carried a brown cup with him. But though he saw hundreds of gipsies, yet he never again saw the girl who had thrown the cup, and none of the men knew anything about the man, nor could tell him anything about the little brown bowl. Then he went to the shops in the big towns where jars and bowls are sold, and asked for a cup that had a spell in it, for he thought if they sold such a one, they might know how to help him to undo the work of the gipsy’s bowl, but everywhere the people only laughed at him.
So he went through strange countries, seeing strange things, but none of them gave him any pleasure, since he was always thinking of his wife at
