are two words for “bad” in English Gipsy, wafro and vessavo; and I think it must have taken me ten minutes one day to learn, from a by no means dull gipsy, whether the latter word was known to him, or if it were used at all.  He got himself into a hopeless tangle in trying to explain the difference between wafro and naflo, or ill, until his mind finally refused to act on vessavo at all, and spasmodically rejected it.  With all the patience of Job, and the meekness of Moses, I awaited my time, and finally obtained my information.

The impatience of such minds in narrative is amusing.  Let us suppose that I am asking some kushto Rommany chal for a version of Æsop’s fable of the youth and the cat.  He is sitting comfortably by the fire, and good ale has put him into a story-telling humour.  I begin—

“Now then, tell me this adrée Rommanis, in Gipsy—Once upon a time there was a young man who had a cat.”

Gipsy.—“Yeckorus—’pré yeck cheirus—a raklo lelled a matchka”—

While I am writing this down, and long before it is half done, the professor of Rommany, becoming interested in the subject, continues volubly—

—“an’ the matchka yeck sala dicked a chillico apré a rukk—(and the cat one morning saw a bird in a tree”—)

I.—“Stop, stop!  Hatch a wongish!  That is not it!  Now go on.  The young man loved this cat so much”—

Gipsy (fluently, in Rommany), “that he thought her skin would make a nice pair of gloves”—

“Confound your gloves!  Now do begin again”—

Gipsy, with an air of grief and injury: “I’m sure I was telling the story for you the best way I knew how!”

Yet this man was far from being a fool.  What was it, then?  Simply and solely, a lack of education—of that mental training which even those who never entered a schoolhouse, receive more or less of, when they so much as wait patiently for a month behind a chair, or tug for six months at a plough, or in short, acquire the civilised virtue of Christian patience.  That is it.  We often hear in this world that a little education goes a great way; but to get some idea of the immense value of a very little education indeed, and the incredible effect it may have upon character, one should study with gentleness and patience a real Gipsy.

Probably the most universal error in the world is the belief that all men, due allowance being made for greater or less knowledge, or “talents,” have minds like our own; are endowed with the same moral perception, and see things on the whole very much as we do.  Now the truth is that a Chinese, whose mind is formed, not by “religion” as we understand it, but simply by the intense pressure of “Old Custom,” which we do not understand, thinks in a different manner from an European; moralists accuse him of “moral obliquity,” but in reality it is a moral difference.  Docility of mind, the patriarchal principle, and the very perfection of innumerable wise and moral precepts have, by the practice of thousands of years, produced in him their natural result.  Whenever he attempts to think, his mind runs at once into some broad and open path, beautifully bordered with dry artificial flowers, {21} and the result has been the inability to comprehend any new idea—a state to which the Church of the Middle Ages, or any too rigidly established system, would in a few thousand years have reduced humanity.  Under the action of widely different causes, the gipsy has also a different cast of mind from our own, and a radical moral difference.  A very few years ago, when I was on the Plains of Western Kansas, old Black Kettle, a famous Indian chief said in a speech, “I am not a white man, I am a wolf.  I was born like a wolf on the prairies.  I have lived like a wolf, and I shall die like one.”  Such is the wild gipsy.  Ever poor and hungry, theft seems to him, in the trifling easy manner in which he practises it, simply a necessity.  The moral aspects of petty crime he never considers at all, nor does he, in fact, reflect upon anything as it is reflected on by the humblest peasant who goes to church, or who in any way feels himself connected as an integral part of that great body-corporate—Society.

CHAPTER II.  A GIPSY COTTAGE.

The Old Fortune-Teller and her Brother.—The Patteran, or Gipsies’ Road-Mark .—The Christian Cross, named by Continental Gipsies Trushul, after the Trident of Siva.—Curious English-Gipsy term for the Cross.—Ashwood Fires on Christmas Day.—Our Saviour regarded with affection by the Rommany because he was like themselves and poor.—Strange ideas of the Bible.—The Oak.—Lizards renew their lives.—Snails.—Slugs.—Tobacco Pipes as old as the world.

“Duveleste; Avo.  Mandy’s kaired my patteran adusta chairuses where a drum jals atut the waver,” which means in English—“God bless you, yes.  Many a time I have marked my sign where the roads cross.”

I was seated in the cottage of an old Gipsy mother, one of the most noted fortune-tellers in England, when I heard this from her brother, himself an ancient wanderer, who loves far better to hear the lark sing than the mouse cheep when he wakes of a morning.

It was a very small but clean cottage, of the kind quite peculiar to the English labourer, and therefore attractive to every one who has felt the true spirit of the most original poetry and art which this country has produced.  For look high or low, dear reader, you will find that nothing has ever been better done in England than the pictures of rural life, and over nothing have its gifted minds cast a deeper charm.

There were the little rough porcelain figures of which the English peasantry are so fond, and which, cheap as they are, indicate that the taste of your friends Lady --- for Worcester “porcelain,” or the Duchess of --- for Majolica, has its roots among far humbler folk.  In fact there were perhaps twenty things which no English reader would have supposed were peculiar, yet which were something more than peculiar to me.  The master of the house was an Anglo-Saxon—a Gorgio—and his wife, by some magic or other, the oracle before-mentioned.

And I, answering said—

“So you all call it patteran?” {24}

“No; very few of us know that name.  We do it without calling it anything.”

Then I took my stick and marked on the floor the following sign—

“There,” I said, “is the oldest patteran—first of all—which the Gipsies use to-day in foreign lands.  In Germany, when one band of Gipsies goes by a cross road, they draw that deep in the dust, with the end of the longest line pointing in the direction in which they have gone.  Then, the next who come by see the mark, and, if they choose, follow it.”

“We make it differently,” said the Gipsy.  “This is our sign—the trin bongo drums, or cross.”  And he drew his patteran thus—

“The long end points the way,” he added; “just as in your sign.”

“You call a cross,” I remarked, “trin bongo drums, or the three crooked roads.  Do you know any such word as trúshul for it?”