evening to the lodging-house, he would cunningly borrow my knife, and then disappear. Presently the whiz-whiz, st’st of his wheel would be heard without, and then the artful dodger would reappear with a triumphant smile, and with the knife sharpened to a razor edge. Anent which gratitude I shall have more to say anon.
One day I was walking on the Front, when I overtook a gypsy van, loaded with baskets and mats, lumbering along. The proprietor, who was a stranger to me, was also slightly or lightly lumbering in his gait, being cheerfully beery, while his berry brown wife, with a little three-year-old boy, peddled wares from door to door. Both were amazed and pleased at being accosted in Romany. In the course of conversation they showed great anxiety as to their child, who had long suffered from some disorder which caused them great alarm. The man’s first name was Anselo, though it was painted Onslow on his vehicle. Mr. Anselo, though himself just come to town, was at once deeply impressed with the duty of hospitality to a Romany rye. I had called him pal, and this in gypsydom involves the shaking of hands, and with the better class an extra display of courtesy. He produced half a crown, and declared his willingness to devote it all to beer for my benefit. I declined, but he repeated his offer several times,—not with any annoying display, but with a courteous earnestness, intended to set forth a sweet sincerity. As I bade him good-by, he put the crown-piece into one eye, and as he danced backward, gypsy fashion up the street and vanished in the sunny purple twilight towards the sea I could see him winking with the other, and hear him cry, “Don’t say no—now’s the last chance—do I hear a bid?”
We found this family in due time at the lodging-house, where the little boy proved to be indeed seriously ill, and we at once discovered that the parents, in their ignorance, had quite misunderstood his malady and were aggravating it by mal-treatment. To these poor people the good Palmer also gave an order on the old physician, who declared that the boy must have died in a few days, had he not taken charge of him. As it was, the little fellow was speedily cured. There was, it appeared, some kind of consanguinity between the tinker or his wife and the Anselo family. These good people, anxious to do anything, yet able to do little, consulted together as to showing their gratitude, and noting that we were specially desirous of collecting old gypsy words gave us all they could think of, and without informing us of their intention, which indeed we only learned by accident a long time after, sent a messenger many miles to bring to Aberystwith a certain Bosville, who was famed as being deep in Romany lore, and in possession of many ancient words. Which was indeed true, he having been the first to teach us pisāli, meaning a saddle, and in which Professor Cowell, of Cambridge, promptly detected the Sanskrit for sit-upon, the same double meaning also existing in boshto; or, as old Mrs. Buckland said to me at Oaklands Park, in Philadelphia, “a pisāli is the same thing with a boshto.”
“What will gain thy faith?” said Quentin Durward to Hayradden Maugrabhin. “Kindness,” answered the gypsy.
The joint families, solely with intent to please us, although they never said a word about it, next sent for a young Romany, one of the Lees, and his wife
whom they supposed we would like to meet. Walking along the Front, I met the tinker’s wife with the handsomest Romany girl I ever beheld. In a London ball-room or on the stage she would have been a really startling beauty. This was young Mrs. Lee. Her husband was a clever violinist, and it was very remarkable that when he gave himself up to playing, with abandon or self-forgetfulness, there came into his melodies the same wild gypsy expression, the same chords and tones, which abound in the music of the Austrian Tsigane. It was not my imagination which prompted the recognition; the Palmer also observed it, without thinking it remarkable. From the playing of both Mat Woods and young Lee, I am sure that there has survived among the Welsh gypsies some of the spirit of their old Eastern music, just as in the solo dancing of Mat’s sister there was precisely the same kind of step which I had seen in Moscow. Among the hundreds of the race whom I have met in Great Britain, I have never known any young people who were so purely Romany as these. The tinker and Anselo with his wife had judged wisely that we would be pleased with this picturesque couple. They always seemed to me in the house like two wild birds, and tropical ones at that, in a cage. There was a tawny-gold, black and scarlet tone about them and their garb, an Indian Spanish duskiness and glow which I loved to look at.
Every proceeding of the tinker and Anselo was veiled in mystery and hidden in the obscurity so dear to such grown-up children, but as I observed after a few days that Lee did nothing beyond acting as assistant to the tinker at the wheel, I surmised that the visit was solely for our benefit. As the tinker
was devoted to his poor wife, so was Anselo and his dame devoted to their child. He was, indeed, a brave little fellow, and frequently manifested the precocious pluck and sturdiness so greatly admired by the Romanys of the road; and when he would take a whip and lead the horse, or in other ways show his courage, the delight of his parents was in its turn delightful. They would look at the child as if charmed, and then at one another with feelings too deep for words, and then at me for sympathetic admiration.
The keeper of the house where they lodged was in his way a character and a linguist. Welsh was his native tongue and English his second best. He also knew others, such as Romany, of which he was proud, and the Shelta or Minklas of the tinkers, of which he was not. The only language which he knew of which he was really ashamed was Italian, and though he could maintain a common conversation in it he always denied that he remembered more than a few words. For it was not as the tongue of Dante, but as the lingo of organ-grinders and such “catenone” that he knew it, and I think that the Palmer and I lost dignity in his eyes by inadvertently admitting that it was familiar to us. “I shouldn’t have thought it,” was all his comment on the discovery, but I knew his thought, and it was that we had made ourselves unnecessarily familiar with vulgarity.
It is not every one who is aware of the extent to which Italian is known by the lower orders in London. It is not spoken as a language; but many of its words, sadly mangled, are mixed with English as a jargon. Thus the Italian scappare, to escape, or run away, has become scarper; and a dweller in the