With a very little alteration in sounds, and not more than children make of these verses in different places, this may be read as follows:—
“’Ekkeri, akai-ri, you kair—án.
Filissin follasy. Nakelas jā’n.
Kivi, kavi. Irishman.
Stini—stani—buck!”
This is nonsense, of course, but it is Romany, or gypsy, and may be translated:—
“First—here—you begin.
Castle—gloves. You don’t play. Go on!
Kivi—kettle. How are you?
Stini—buck—buck.”
The common version of the rhyme begins with:—
“One ’eri—two-ery, ékkeri—án.”
But one-ry is the exact translation of ékkeri; ek or yek being one. And it is remarkable that in
“Hickory dickory dock,
The rat ran up the clock;
The clock struck one,
And down he run,
Hickory dickory dock.”
We have hickory or ekkeri again, followed by a significant one. It may be observed that while, the first verses abound in Romany words, I can find no trace of any in other child-rhymes of the kind. It is also clear that if we take from the fourth line the ingle ’em, angle ’em, evidently added for mere jingle, there remains stan or stani, “a buck,” followed by the very same word in English.
With the mournful examples of Mr. Bellenden Kerr’s efforts to show that all our old proverbs and tavern signs are Dutch, and Sir William Betham’s Etruscan-Irish, I should be justly regarded as one of the too frequent seekers for mystery in moonshine if I declared that I positively believed this to be Romany. Yet it is possible that it contains gypsy words, especially “fillissi,’ follasy,” which mean exactly château and gloves, and I think it not improbable that it was once a sham charm used by some Romany fortune-teller to bewilder Gorgios. Let the reader imagine the burnt-sienna wild-cat eyed old sorceress performing before a credulous farm-wife and her children the great ceremony of hākk’ni pānki, which Mr. Borrow calls hokkani boro, but for which there is a far deeper name,—that of the great secret,—which even my best friends among the Romany tried to conceal from me. This feat is performed by inducing some woman of largely magnified faith to believe that there is hidden in her house a magic treasure, which can only be made to come to hand by depositing in the cellar another treasure, to which it will come by