There is a meaningless rhyme, very common among children. It is repeated while counting off those who are taking part in a game, and allotting to each a place. It is as follows:—

“Ekkeri akkery u-kery an
Fillisi’, follasy, Nicolas John
Queebee-quabee—Irishman.
Stingle ’em—stangle ’em—buck!”

With a very little alteration in sounds, and not more than children make of these verses in different places, this may be read as follows:—

“’Ekkeri, akai-ri, you kair—Án.
Filissin follasy. Nakelas ja’n.
Kivi, kavi. Irishman.
Stini—stani—buck!”

This is nonsense, of course, but it is Romany, or gypsy, and may be translated:—

“First—here—you begin.
Castle—gloves. You don’t play. Go on!
Kivi—kettle. How are you?
Stini—buck—buck.”

The common version of the rhyme begins with:—

“One ’eri—two-ery, Ékkeri—Án.”

But one-ry is the exact translation of Ékkeri; ek or yek being one. And it is remarkable that in

“Hickory dickory dock,
The rat ran up the clock;
The clock struck one,
And down he run,
Hickory dickory dock.”

We have hickory or ekkeri again, followed by a significant one. It may be observed that while, the first verses abound in Romany words, I can find no trace of any in other child-rhymes of the kind. It is also clear that if we take from the fourth line the ingle ’em, angle ’em, evidently added for mere jingle, there remains stan or stani, “a buck,” followed by the very same word in English.

With the mournful examples of Mr. Bellenden Kerr’s efforts to show that all our old proverbs and tavern signs are Dutch, and Sir William Betham’s Etruscan-Irish, I should be justly regarded as one of the too frequent seekers for mystery in moonshine if I declared that I positively believed this to be Romany. Yet it is possible that it contains gypsy words, especially “fillissi,’ follasy,” which mean exactly chÂteau and gloves, and I think it not improbable that it was once a sham charm used by some Romany fortune-teller to bewilder Gorgios. Let the reader imagine the burnt-sienna wild-cat eyed old sorceress performing before a credulous farm-wife and her children the great ceremony of hakk’ni panki, which Mr. Borrow calls hokkani boro, but for which there is a far deeper name,—that of the great secret,—which even my best friends among the Romany tried to conceal from me. This feat is performed by inducing some woman of largely magnified faith to believe that there is hidden in her house a magic treasure, which can only be made to come to hand by depositing in the cellar another treasure, to which it will come by natural affinity and attraction. “For gold, as you sees, my deari, draws gold, and so if you ties up all your money in a pocket-handkercher and leaves it, you’ll find it doubled. An’ wasn’t there the Squire’s lady, and didn’t she draw two hundred old gold guineas out of the ground where they’d laid in a old grave,—and only one guinea she gave me for all my trouble; an’ I hope you’ll do better by the poor old gypsy, my deari --- ---.”

The gold and all the spoons are tied up,—for, as the enchantress observes, there may be silver too,—and she solemnly repeats over it magical rhymes, while the children, standing around in awe, listen to every word. It is a good subject for a picture. Sometimes the windows are closed, and candles give the only light. The next day the gypsy comes and sees how the charm is working. Could any one look under her cloak he might find another bundle precisely resembling the one containing the treasure. She looks at the precious deposit, repeats her rhyme again, and departs, after carefully charging the housewife that the bundle must not be touched or spoken of for three weeks. “Every word you tell about it, my-deari will be a guinea gone away.” Sometimes she exacts an oath on the Bible that nothing shall be said.

Back to the farmer’s wife never again. After three weeks another Extraordinary instance of gross credulity appears in the country paper, and is perhaps repeated in a colossal London daily, with a reference to the absence of the school-master. There is wailing and shame in the house,—perhaps great suffering, for it may be that the savings of years have beer swept away. The charm has worked.

But the little sharp-eared children remember it and sing it, and the more meaningless it is in their ears the more mysterious does it sound. And they never talk about the bundle, which when opened was found to contain only sticks, stones, and rags, without repeating it. So it goes from mouth to mouth, until, all mutilated, it passes current for even worse nonsense than it was at first. It may be observed, however,—and the remark will be fully substantiated by any one who knows the language,—that there is a Romany turn to even the roughest corners of these rhymes. Kivi, stingli, stangli, are all gypsyish. But, as I have already intimated, this does not appear in any other nonsense verses of the kind. There is nothing of it in

“Intery, mintery, cutery corn”—

or in anything else in Mother Goose. It is alone in its sounds and sense,—or nonsense. But there is not a wanderer of the roads who on hearing it would not explain, “Rya, there’s a great deal of Romanes in that ere.”

I should also say that the word na-kelas or nÉ-kelas, which I here translate differently, was once explained to me at some length by a gypsy as signifying “not speaking,” or “keeping quiet.”

Now the mystery of mysteries of which I have spoken in the Romany tongue is this. The hokkani boro, or great trick, consists of three parts. Firstly, the telling of a fortune, and this is to pen dukkerin or pen durkerin. The second part is the conveying away of the property, which is to lel dudikabin, or to take lightning, possibly connected with the very old English slang term of bien lightment. There is evidently a great confusion of words here. And the third is to “chiv o manzin aprÉ lati,” or to put the oath upon her, which explains itself. When all the deceived are under oath not to utter a word about the trick, the gypsy mother has “a safe thing of it.”

The hokkani boro, or great trick, was brought by the gypsies from the East. It has been practiced by them all over the world, it is still played every day somewhere. This chapter was written long ago in England. I am now in Philadelphia, and here I read in the “Press” of this city that a Mrs. Brown, whom I sadly and reluctantly believe is the wife of an acquaintance of mine, who walks before the world in other names, was arrested for the same old game of fortune-telling and persuading a simple dame that there was treasure in the house, and all the rest of the grand deception. And Mrs. Brown, good old Mrs. Brown, went to prison, where she will linger until a bribed alderman, or a purchased pardon, or some one of the numerous devices by which justice is evaded in Pennsylvania, delivers her.

Yet it is not a good country, on the whole, for hokkani boro, since the people here, especially in the rural districts, have a rough-and-ready way of inflicting justice which interferes sadly with the profits of aldermen and other politicians. Some years ago, in Tennessee, a gypsy woman robbed a farmer by the great trick of all he was worth. Now it is no slander to say that the rural folk of Tennessee greatly resemble Indians in certain respects, and when I saw thousands of them, during the war, mustered out in Nashville, I often thought, as I studied their dark brown faces, high cheek bones, and long straight black hair, that the American is indeed reverting to the aboriginal type. The Tennessee farmer and his neighbors, at any rate, reverted very strongly indeed to the original type when robbed by the gypsies, for they turned out all together, hunted them down, and, having secured the sorceress, burned her alive at the stake. And thus in a single crime and its punishment we have curiously combined a world-old Oriental offense, an European Middle-Age penalty for witchcraft, and the fierce torture of the red Indians.