The Gypsies are an imaginative folk, delighting, like children, in romances and romancing; and if one may judge from the array of folk-tales [256] already collected from them, these wanderers appear to possess the gift of story-telling in generous measure. To this day, in Eastern Europe, the Gypsies still pursue their ancient rôle of tale-telling, mystifying their hearers with stories which perhaps they brought out of India many centuries ago. Here, in the West, no one can mingle intimately with members of the Gypsy clan of Wood, amid the mountains of Wales, without feeling the charm of the wonderful tales handed down to them from their forelders.
Sometimes I have seen the beginning of a folktale in a fragment of narrative reeled off by a Gypsy on the spur of the moment.
A London Gypsy had been fiddling for my delectation, and, when he ceased, I asked him quite casually why, being a Gypsy, his hair was fair? Without a moment’s reflection he replied, “I’ll tell you why my hair is fair. One winter night I slept with my head outside the tent, and of course my hair froze to the ground. When I woke in the morning I shouted for help, and my daddy poured boiling water on my hair to get it loose. That’s why my bal is pawni” (my hair is fair).
An impromptu “lying tale” intended to amuse.
Groome, in his Gypsy-Folk Tales (Introduction, p. lxxxi.), notices the same sort of thing in a fanciful outburst on the part of a Gypsy girl. “She had been to a pic-nic in a four-in-hand, with ‘a lot o’ real tiptop gentry’; and ‘reia’ (sir), she said to me afterwards, ‘I’ll tell you the comicalist thing that ever was. We’d pulled up to put the brake on, and there was a puro hotchiwitchi (old hedgehog) come and looked at us through the hedge, looked at me hard. I could see he’d his eye on me. And home he’d go, that old hedgehog, to his wife, and “Missus,” he’d say, “what d’ye think? I seen a little Gypsy gal just now in a coach and four hosses,” and “Dâbla” she’d say, “sawkûmi ’as vâdê kenaw” (Bless us, every one has carriages now).’”
Years ago I used to hear our English Gypsies speak of a certain Happy Boz’ll, a Gypsy given to romancing about his own affairs. He was always the hero of his own stories, and to this day, among our Gypsies, a Happy Boz’ll tale is a synonym for a “crammer.”
It was once my good fortune at Lincoln Fair to come upon a van-dwelling horse-dealer, close upon his eightieth year, whose early days were spent in the company of Happy Boz’ll, and from him I obtained the tales given below:—
Old Happy had a donkey, and one day it was lost. Up and down the green lanes the Gypsy searched for the missing animal and found it not. At last, as he was wandering under some trees, he heard a familiar noise overhead. The sound came from the top of a big ash tree, and sure enough, when Happy looked up, there was the old donkey among the topmost boughs.
“What are you doing there?” shouted Happy.
“I’m gathering a bundle of sticks for your fire.”