“And when my wife saw me half-naked, she says, ‘Where are your clothes?’ and I told her I had been fighting. But she said, ‘Why, you have not your stockings on; you didn’t fight your stockings off!’ ‘No,’ I said; ‘I drew them off.’ (The man played me with a two-headed halfpenny.)
“But in the morning when the man came to take away the dog (for I had lost that too), I felt worse than when I lost all the other things. And my poor wife cried again, for she had no child. I had in those days as fine clothes as any young Gipsy in England—good coats, and shirts, and handkerchiefs.
“And that man hurt many a man after me, but he never had any luck. He’d steal from his own father; but he died miserably in East Kent.”
It was characteristic of the venerable wanderer who had installed himself as my permanent professor of Rommany, that although almost every phrase which he employed to illustrate words expressed some act at variance with law or the rights of property, he was never weary of descanting on the spotlessness, beauty, and integrity of his own life and character. These little essays on his moral perfection were expressed with a touching artlessness and child-like simplicity which would carry conviction to any one whose heart had not been utterly hardened, or whose eye-teeth had not been remarkably well cut, by contact with the world. In his delightful naïveté and simple earnestness, in his ready confidence in strangers and freedom from all suspicion—in fact, in his whole deportment, this Rommany elder reminded me continually of one—and of one man only—whom I had known of old in America. Need I say that I refer to the excellent --- ---?
It happened for many days that the professor, being a man of early habits, arrived at our rendezvous an hour in advance of the time appointed. As he resolutely resisted all invitation to occupy the room alone until my arrival, declaring that he had never been guilty of such a breach of etiquette, and as he was, moreover, according to his word, the most courteous man of the world in it, and I did not wish to “contrary” him, he was obliged to pass the time in the street, which he did by planting himself on the front steps or expanding himself on the railings of an elderly and lonely dame, who could not endure that even a mechanic should linger at her door, and was in agony until the milkman and baker had removed their feet from her steps. Now, the appearance of the professor (who always affected the old Gipsy style), in striped corduroy coat, leather breeches and gaiters, red waistcoat, yellow neck-handkerchief, and a frightfully-dilapidated old white hat, was not, it must be admitted, entirely adapted to the exterior of a highly respectable mansion. “And he had such a vile way of looking, as if he were a-waitin’ for some friend to come out o’ the ’ouse.” It is almost needless to say that this apparition attracted the police from afar off and all about, or that they gathered around him like buzzards near a departed lamb. I was told by a highly intelligent gentleman who witnessed the interviews, that the professor’s kindly reception of these public characters—the infantile smile with which he courted their acquaintance, and the good old grandfatherly air with which he listened to their little tales—was indescribably delightful. “In a quarter of an hour any one of them would have lent him a shilling;” and it was soon apparent that the entire force found a charm in his society. The lone lady herself made a sortie against him once; but one glance at the amiable smile, “which was child-like and bland,” disarmed her, and it was reported that she subsequently sent him out half-a-pint of beer.
It is needless to point out to the reader accustomed to good society that the professor’s declining to sit in a room where valuable and small objects abounded, in the absence of the owner, was dictated by the most delicate feeling. Not less remarkable than his strict politeness was the mysterious charm which this antique nomad unquestionably exercised on the entire female sex. Ladies of the highest respectability and culture, old or young, who had once seen him, invariably referred to him as “that charming old Gipsy.”
Nor was his sorcery less potent on those of low degree. Never shall I forget one morning when the two prettiest young Italian model-girls in all London were poséeing to an artist friend while the professor sat and imparted to me the lore of the Rommany. The girls behaved like moral statues till he appeared, and like quicksilver imps and devilettes for the rest of the sitting. Something of the wild and weird in the mountain Italian life of these ex-contadine seemed to wake like unholy fire, and answer sympathetically to the Gipsy wizard-spell. Over mountain and sea, and through dark forests with legends of streghe and Zingari, these semi-outlaws of society, the Neapolitan and Rommany, recognised each other intuitively. The handsomest young gentleman in England could not have interested these handsome young sinners as the dark-brown, grey-haired old vagabond did. Their eyes stole to him. Heaven knows what they talked, for the girls knew no English, but they whispered; they could not write little notes, so they kept passing different objects, to which Gipsy and Italian promptly attached a meaning. Scolding them helped not. It was “a pensive sight.”
To impress me with a due sense of his honesty and high character, the professor informed me one day that he was personally acquainted, as he verily believed, with every policeman in England. “You see, rya,” he remarked, “any man as is so well known couldn’t never do nothing wrong now,—could he?”
Innocent, unconscious, guileless air—and smile! I shall never see its equal. I replied—
“Yes; I think I can see you, Puro, walking down between two lines of hundreds of policemen—every one pointing after you and saying, ‘There goes that good honest --- the honestest man in England!’”