Quickly a dozen pink palms were uplifted, and I could see that several lips were bursting with information. Imagine my surprise when I was informed—“red-herring, sprats, and mackerel.”
On the following evening I went across the fields to see my friends by the watermill. The amber light of sunset was falling upon green hedge and rippling river. From a thorn bush a nightingale jug-jugged deliciously. There was poetry in the air. Nor was it dispelled by the discovery that my friends had drawn their “house on wheels” into the grassy lane leading down to the ford.
Seated on a mound of sand, Jonathan was chatting with a stranger who had the looks of an Irishman. I joined them, but no sooner had I dropped a word or two of Romany than the stranger arose, saying, “I don’t understand your talk, so I’d better be going.” He then left us, and, seeing he had gone away, old Fazenti, Jonathan’s wife, stepped down from the living-wagon, and our discourse became considerably enlivened by her presence.
Speaking of dukerin (fortune-telling), she said, “It’ll go on while the world lasts,” which was Fazzy’s way of saying that the credulous will be in the world after the poor have left it. “It’s the hawking-basket that gi’s us our chance, don’t you dik (see)? I takes care never to be without my licence, and the muskro (policeman) would have to get up wery early to catch old Fazzy asleep. Did I ever have any mulo-mas? [61] Many’s the time I’ve had a bit. In spring, when lambs are about, that’s the time for mulo-mas.
“A good country for hedgehogs is this, but we don’t eat ’em in the spring. The back end of the year is the best time for ’em; there’s a bit of flesh on ’em then. When you find one, if he’s rolled up in a ball, you rub his back with a stick right down his spine, and he’ll open out fast enough. Then you hit him hard on the nose, and he’s as dead as a door nail. The old way of cooking him was to cover him with clay and bake him in the fire. When he was cooked you tapped the clay ball, and the prickles and skin came away with the clay. Nowadays we burn down the bristles, then shave ’em off, draw and clean him and roast him on a spit before a hot fire. He’s wery good with puvengris (potatoes), sage, and onions. Bouris (snails) are good to eat in winter. You get them in a hard frost from behind old stumps of trees. You put salt on ’em and they make fine broth. Wery strengthening is bouri-zimen” (snail broth).
While we were conversing, Jonathan’s grandsons passed by with a lurcher.
“A useful dog, that, I should think,” said I.
“Kushto yek sî dova for shushiaw and kanengrê” (A good one is that for rabbits and hares), replied the old man. “I minds well the day I bought him off a man with a pot-cart as was stopping along with us. We’d got leave from a farmer to draw into a lane running between some clover fields, and we were just sitting down to a cup o’ tea when a keeper comes along and says—
“‘I’m afraid some of you fellows have been up to mischief, because there’s a hare in a snare along this hedge.’