Our informant could give only a single specimen of the Shelta literature. It was as follows:—
“My name is Barney Mucafee,
With my borers and jumpers down to my thee (thigh).
An’ it’s forty miles I’ve come to kerrb yer pee.”
This vocabulary is, as he declared, an extremely imperfect specimen of the language. He did not claim to speak it well. In its purity it is not mingled with Romany or thieves’ slang. Perhaps some student of English dialects may yet succeed in recovering it all. The pronunciation of many of the words is singular, and very different from English or Romany.
Just as the last word was written down, there came up a woman, a female tramp of the most hardened
kind. It seldom happens that gentlemen sit down in familiar friendly converse with vagabonds. When they do they are almost always religious people, anxious to talk with the poor for the good of their souls. The talk generally ends with a charitable gift. Such was the view (as the vagabond afterwards told us) which she took of our party. I also infer that she thought we must be very verdant and an easy prey. Almost without preliminary greeting she told us that she was in great straits,—suffering terribly,—and appealed to the man for confirmation, adding that if we would kindly lend her a sovereign it should be faithfully repaid in the morning.
The professor burst out laughing. But the fern-collector gazed at her in wrath and amazement.
“I say, old woman,” he cried; “do you know who you’re rakkerin [speaking] to? This here gentleman is one of the deepest Romany ryes [gypsy gentlemen] a-going. And that there one could gladdher you out of your eye-teeth.”
She gave one look of dismay,—I shall never forget that look,—and ran away. The witch had chanced upon Arbaces. I think that the tramp had been in his time a man in better position. He was possibly a lawyer’s clerk who had fallen into evil ways. He spoke English correctly when not addressing the beggar woman. There was in Aberystwith at the same time another fern-seller, an elderly man, as wretched and as ragged a creature as I ever met. Yet he also spoke English purely, and could give in Latin the names of all the plants which he sold. I have always supposed that the tinkers’ language spoken of by Shakespeare was Romany; but I now incline to think it may have been Shelta.
Time passed, and “the levis grene” had fallen
thrice from the trees, and I had crossed the sea and was in my native city of Philadelphia. It was a great change after eleven years of Europe, during ten of which I had “homed,” as gypsies say, in England. The houses and the roads were old-new to me; there was something familiar-foreign in the voices and ways of those who had been my earliest friends; the very air as it blew hummed tunes which had lost tones in them that made me marvel. Yet even here I soon found traces of something which is the same all the world over, which goes ever on “as of ever,” and that was the wanderer of the road. Near the city are three distinct gypsyries, where in summer-time the wagon and the tent may be found; and ever and anon, in my walks about town, I found interesting varieties of vagabonds from every part of Europe. Italians of the most Bohemian type, who once had been like angels,—and truly only in this, that their visits of old were few and far between,—now swarmed as fruit dealers and boot-blacks in every lane; Germans were of course at home; Czechs, or Slavs, supposed to be Germans, gave unlimited facilities for Slavonian practice; while tinkers, almost unknown in 1860, had in 1880 become marvelously common, and strange to say were nearly all Austrians of different kinds. And yet not quite all, and it was lucky for me they were not. For one morning, as I went into the large garden which lies around the house wherein I wone, I heard by the honeysuckle and grape-vine a familiar sound,—suggestive of the road and Romanys and London, and all that is most traveler-esque. It was the tap, tap, tap of a hammer and the clang of tin, and I knew by the smoke that so gracefully curled at the end of the garden a tinker was near. And I advanced to him, and as he glanced up and