Gipsy.—“Yeckorus—’pré yeck cheirus—a raklo lelled a matchka”—
While I am writing this down, and long before it is half done, the professor of Rommany, becoming interested in the subject, continues volubly—
—“an’ the matchka yeck sala dicked a chillico apré a rukk—(and the cat one morning saw a bird in a tree”—)
I.—“Stop, stop! Hatch a wongish! That is not it! Now go on. The young man loved this cat so much”—
Gipsy (fluently, in Rommany), “that he thought her skin would make a nice pair of gloves”—
“Confound your gloves! Now do begin again”—
Gipsy, with an air of grief and injury: “I’m sure I was telling the story for you the best way I knew how!”
Yet this man was far from being a fool. What was it, then? Simply and solely, a lack of education—of that mental training which even those who never entered a schoolhouse, receive more or less of, when they so much as wait patiently for a month behind a chair, or tug for six months at a plough, or in short, acquire the civilised virtue of Christian patience. That is it. We often hear in this world that a little education goes a great way; but to get some idea of the immense value of a very little education indeed, and the incredible effect it may have upon character, one should study with gentleness and patience a real Gipsy.
Probably the most universal error in the world is the belief that all men, due allowance being made for greater or less knowledge, or “talents,” have minds like our own; are endowed with the same moral perception, and see things on the whole very much as we do. Now the truth is that a Chinese, whose mind is formed, not by “religion” as we understand it, but simply by the intense pressure of “Old Custom,” which we do not understand, thinks in a different manner from an European; moralists accuse him of “moral obliquity,” but in reality it is a moral difference. Docility of mind, the patriarchal principle, and the very perfection of innumerable wise and moral precepts have, by the practice of thousands of years, produced in him their natural result. Whenever he attempts to think, his mind runs at once into some broad and open path, beautifully bordered with dry artificial flowers, [{21}] and the result has been the inability to comprehend any new idea—a state to which the Church of the Middle Ages, or any too rigidly established system, would in a few thousand years have reduced humanity. Under the action of widely different causes, the gipsy has also a different cast of mind from our own, and a radical moral difference. A very few years ago, when I was on the Plains of Western Kansas, old Black Kettle, a famous Indian chief said in a speech, “I am not a white man, I am a wolf. I was born like a wolf on the prairies. I have lived like a wolf, and I shall die like one.” Such is the wild gipsy. Ever poor and hungry, theft seems to him, in the trifling easy manner in which he practises it, simply a necessity. The moral aspects of petty crime he never considers at all, nor does he, in fact, reflect upon anything as it is reflected on by the humblest peasant who goes to church, or who in any way feels himself connected as an integral part of that great body-corporate—Society.