And he said he could.
Then we conversed. He spoke English intermingled with Gipsy, stopping from time to time to explain to his assistant, or to teach him a word. This portly person appeared to be about as well up in the English Gipsy as myself—that is, he knew it quite as imperfectly. I learned that the master had been in America, and made New York and Brooklyn glad by his presence, while Philadelphia, my native city had been benefited as to its scissors and morals by him.
“And as I suppose you made money there, why didn’t you remain?” I inquired.
The Gipsy—for he was really a Gipsy, and not a half-scrag—looked at me wistfully, and apparently a little surprised that I should ask him such a question.
“Why, sir, you know that we can’t keep still. Somethin’ kept telling me to move on, and keep a movin’. Some day I’ll go back again.”
Suddenly—I suppose because a doubt of my perfect Freemasonry had been aroused by my absurd question—he said, holding up a kettle—
“What do you call this here in Rommanis?”
“I call it a kekávi or a kavi,” I said. “But it isn’t right Rommany. It’s Greek, which the Rommanichals picked up on their way here.”
And here I would remark, by the way, that I have seldom spoken to a Gipsy in England who did not try me on the word for kettle.
“And what do you call a face?” he added.