1. That Rommany is the language of men at war with the law; therefore you are either a detective who has acquired it for no healthy purpose, or else you yourself are a scamp so high up in the profession that it behooves all the little fish of outlawdom to beware of you.
2. Or else—what is quite as much to be dreaded—you are indeed a gentleman, but one seeking to make fun of him, and possibly able to do so. At any rate, your knowledge of Rommany is a most alarming coin of vantage. Certainly, reader, you know that a regular London streeter, say a cabman, would rather go to jail than be beaten in a chaffing match. I nearly drove a hansom into sheer convulsions one night, about the time this chapter happened, by a very light puzzler indeed. I had hesitated between him and another.
“You don’t know your own mind,” said the disappointed candidate to me.
“Mind your own business,” I replied. It was a poor palindrome, [{38}] reader—hardly worth telling—yet it settled him. But he swore—oh, of course he did—he swore beautifully.
Therefore, being moved to caution, I approached calmly and gazed earnestly on the revolving wheel.
“Do you know,” I said, “I think a great deal of your business, and take a great interest in it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I can tell you all the names of your tools in French. You’d like to hear them, wouldn’t you?”
“Wery much indeed, sir.”
So I took up the chisel. “This,” I said, “is a churi, sometimes called a chinomescro.”