“And what is that?”
“Selling ferns. Don’t you understand? That’s what we call it in Minklers Thari. That’s tinkers’ language. I thought as you knew Romanes you might understand it. The right name for it is Shelter or Shelta.”
Out came our note-books and pencils. So this was the Shelter of which I had heard. He was promptly asked to explain what sort of a language it was.
“Well, gentlemen, you must know that I have no
great gift for languages. I never could learn even French properly. I can conjugate the verb être,—that is all. I’m an ignorant fellow, and very low. I’ve been kicked out of the lowest slums in Whitechapel because I was too much of a blackguard for ’em. But I know rhyming slang. Do you know Lord John Russell?”
“Well, I know a little of rhyming, but not that.”
“Why, it rhymes to bustle.”
“I see. Bustle is to pick pockets.”
“Yes, or anything like it, such as ringing the changes.”
Here the professor was “in his plate.” He knows perfectly how to ring the changes. It is effected by going into a shop, asking for change for a sovereign, purchasing some trifling article, then, by ostensibly changing your mind as to having the change, so bewilder the shopman as to cheat him out of ten shillings. It is easily done by one who understands it. The professor does not practice this art for the lucre of gain, but he understands it in detail. And of this he gave such proofs to the tramp that the latter was astonished.