“Pal from Nevi Wesh, I knew it as soon as I saw you.”
Thereupon he introduced me to his relatives, including, apparently, almost every one in that camp. After these preliminaries he spread a sack for me at his fireside and we had a long talk together. He spoke “deep” Romany and acquainted me with a number of words which I believe had not been printed, and informed me that not long previously he had talked with a gentleman speaking an Indian language who understood most of what he said in Romany, while he was able to get at the meaning of a lot of the words the gentleman used, adding that he counted up to six almost the same as in Romany, but for seven, eight and nine he said—as nearly as I can remember—“sart, arth, now.” “Doesn’t that,” said my friend, “seem to prove that the Romanies came from India at one time, else where did we get the language? Some of our folks say, ‘No, we are all English only we don’t speak the same tongue,’ but don’t you believe it, Rye. Did you ever see a real thoroughbred Englishman or woman as dark as my folks, or with hands and feet as well made and as small as ours? No, my pal! hoquepens like that won’t do. Besides, you can always tell a true gypsy by his eye, it’s different somehow from the gorgios. I’m not ‘overstruck’ by the way the gorgios speak to each other either,—they say—hello, Smith! hello, Jones! and so on in the rudest way. Did you ever hear anything better than the gypsy way of calling one another pal for brother and pen for sister? After all we are really brothers and sisters.”
“And would you,” I asked, “call a gorgio a pal?”
“No!” he replied, “and you know it. A gorgio’s a gorgio, and a chal’s a chal, and always will be.”
“But, sometimes a gypsy chi marries a Gentile,” I continued, as I wished to know how he regarded such unions.
“That’s true,” he admitted, “but if a tickno o’ mande’s got romm’d to a gorgio, he or she wouldn’t get help if they wanted it—at least,” he added hastily, as though the vision of one of his children being in dire need while he stood aloof was perhaps not to be thought of, “not as they would be if they kept true. The gypsy law, as you well know, is, that if sickness or trouble of any kind overtakes our folk—our folk, I said, we club together—even if it means parting with the last pasherro—and help, for God alone knows when any of us may want help, but, gorgios,—ugh!”
“One would almost suppose you don’t like them,” I remarked with a smile.
“Like ’em!” he exclaimed. “Me like ’em! Well, I’ll tell you what happened to me; it’s years ago now, but I remember it as well as if it was yesterday:—
“It was not very long after I was married, and my wife and I were very happy in our wedding living-wagon. We travelled all over the country and once or twice into Wales. Well, just about the time my eldest was born the drab-engro told us we’d better atch a bit till the wife was well again, so we found a snug corner a little way from a town and expected to be left in peace. I got permission from the owner of a bit of waste land, to stay a few weeks, and he charged me a few pence a week as rent. This land was next to a kind o’ small park belonging to a gentleman who was one of the grumpy sort. One day, he put his ugly face over the fence and said to me—
“‘What are you doing here?’