“I suppose—ah, I see,” said the Gipsy, with a shrewd look. “He went and drew ’em all back again.”
“No; he went, and this time piped all the children away. They all went after him—all except one little lame boy—and that was the last of it.”
The Gipsy looked earnestly at me, and then, as if I puzzled, but with an expression of perfect faith, he asked—
“And is that all tácho—all a fact—or is it made up, you know?”
“Well, I think it is partly one and partly the other. You see, that in those days Gipsies were very scarce, and people were very much astonished at rat-drawing, and so they made a queer story of it.”
“But how about the children?”
“Well,” I answered; “I suppose you have heard occasionally that Gipsies used to chore Gorgios’ chavis—steal people’s children?”
Very grave indeed was the assent yielded to this explanation. He had heard it among other things.
My dear Mr Robert Browning, I little thought, when I suggested to the artist your poem of the piper, that I should ever retail the story in Rommany to a tinker. But who knows with whom he may associate in this life, or whither he may drift on the great white rolling sea of humanity? Did not Lord Lytton, unless the preface to Pelham err, himself once tarry in the tents of the Egyptians? and did not Christopher North also wander with them, and sing—
“Oh, little did my mother think,
The day she cradled me,
The lands that I should travel in,
Or the death that I should dee;
Or gae rovin’ about wi’ tinkler loons,
And sic-like companie”?