TRANSLATION.
MY DEAR WIFE,—Before I came to Frankfort I went to Neustadt. On the way it did not go well with me. Our men quarrelled together. It was cold and wet weather. The children were ill. That house into which we had gone burnt down; our kid and the young calf run away. The flax and hemp and wool [which] the sister-in-law and step-daughter spun are also burned. In short, I say I became so poor that we all went naked. I thought of cutting wood and working by hand, or I should go into business and sell something. I think I will make my living so. I was so treated by the soldiers. They fell on us, wounded many, three they killed, and I was taken to prison to work for life. Heaven preserve you in all things from that into which I have fallen, and I remain thy husband unto death.
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It is the same sad story in all, wretchedness, poverty, losses, and hunger. In the English letter there was a chingari—a shindy; in the German they have a tshinger, which is nearly the same word, and means the same. It may be remarked as curious that the word meraben at the end of the letter, meaning death, is used by English Gipsies to signify life as well.
“Dick at the gorgios,
The gorgios round mandy;
Trying to take my meripon,
My meripon away.”
The third letter is also in the German-Gipsy dialect, and requires a little explanation. Once a man named Charles Augustus was arrested as a beggar and suspected Gipsy, and brought before Mr Richard Liebich, who appears to have been nothing less in the total than the Fürstlich Reuss-Plauenschem Criminalrathe und Vorstande des Fürstlichen Criminalgerichts zu Lobenstein—in fact, a rather lofty local magistrate. Before this terrible title Charles appeared, and swore stoutly that he was no more a Rommany chal than he was one of the Apostles—for be it remembered, reader, that in Germany at the present day, the mere fact of being a Gipsy is still treated as a crime. Suddenly the judge attacked him with the words—“Tu hal rom, me hom, rakker tschatschopenn!”—“Thou art a Gipsy, I am a Gipsy, speak the truth.” And Charles, looking up in amazement and seeing the black hair and brown face of the judge, verily believed that he was of the blood of Dom. So crossing his arms on his breast in true Oriental style, he salaamed deeply, and in a submissive voice said—“Me hom rom”—“I am a Gipsy.”
The judge did not abuse the confidence gained by his little trick, since he appears to have taken Charles under his wing, employed him in small jobs (in America we should say chores, but the word would be frightfully significant, if applied to a Gipsy), [{75}] and finally dismissed him. And Charles replied Rommanesquely, by asking for something. His application was as follows:—