  It is true that the American gypsy has grown more vigorous in this country, and, like many plants, has thriven better for being trans—I was about to write incautiously ported, but, on second thought, say planted. Strangely enough, he is more Romany than ever. I have had many opportunities of studying both the elders from England and the younger gypsies, born of English parents, and I have found that there is unquestionably a great improvement in the race here, even from a gypsy stand-point. The young sapling, under more favorable influences, has pushed out from the old root, and grown stronger. The causes for this are varied. Gypsies, like peacocks, thrive best when allowed to range afar. Il faut leur donner le clef des champs (you must give them the key of the fields), as I once heard an old Frenchman, employed on Delmonico’s Long Island farm, lang syne, say of that splendid poultry. And what a range they have, from the Atlantic to the Pacific! Marry, sir, ’t is like roaming from sunrise to sunset, east and west, “and from the aurora borealis to a Southern blue-jay,” and no man shall make them afraid. Wood! “Well, ’t is a kushto tem for kasht” I had gone with my niece—who speaks Romany—out to a gypsyry by Oaklands Park, and found there one of our good people, with his wife and children, in a tent. Hard by was the wagon and the horse, and, after the usual initiatory amazement at being accosted in the kalo jib, or black language, had been survived, we settled down into conversation. It was a fine autumnal day, Indian-summery,—the many in one of all that is fine in weather all the world over, put into a single glorious sense,—a sense of bracing air and sunshine not over-bold or bright, and purple, tawny hues in western skies, and dim, sweet feelings of the olden time. And as we sat lounging in lowly seats, and talked about the people and their ways, it seemed to me as if I were again in Devonshire or Surrey. Our host—for every gypsy who is visited treats you as a guest, thus much Oriental politeness being deeply set in him—had been in America from boyhood, but he seemed to be perfectly acquainted with all whom I had known over the sea. Only one thing he had not heard, the death of old Gentilla Cooper, of the Devil’s Dyke, near Brighton, for I had just received a letter from England announcing the sad news. “Yes, this America is a good country for travelers. We can go South in winter. Aye, the land is big enough to go to a warm side in winter, and a cool one in summer. But I don’t go South, because I don’t like the people; I don’t get along with them. Some Romanys do. Yes, but I’m not on that horse, I hear that the old country’s getting to be a hard “Yes,” he continued, “England’s a little country, very little, indeed, but it is astonishing how many Romanys come out of it over here. Do I notice any change in them after coming? I do. When they first come, they drink liquor or beer all the time. After a while they stop heavy drinking.” I may here observe that even in England the gypsy, although his getting drunk is too often regulated or limited simply by his means, seldom shows in his person the results of long-continued intemperance. It is very true that in many parts of America the wanderers are welcomed with feux de joie, or with salutes of shot-guns,—the guns, unfortunately, being The American gypsies do not beg, like their English brothers, and particularly their English sisters. This fact speaks volumes for their greater prosperity and for the influence which association with a proud race has on the poorest people. Our friends at Oaklands always welcomed us as guests. On another occasion when we went there, I said to my niece, “If we find strangers who do not know us, do not “Can you tell a fortune for a young lady?” “She don’t want her fortune told,” replied the old woman, suspiciously and cautiously, or it may be with a view of drawing us on. “No, I can’t tell fortunes.” At this the young lady was so astonished that, without thinking of what she was saying, or in what language, she cried,— “Dordi! Can’t tute pen dukkerin?” (Look! Can’t you tell fortunes?) This unaffected outburst had a greater effect than the most deeply studied theatrical situation could have brought about. The old dame stared at me and at the lady as if bewildered, and cried,— “In the name of God, what kind of gypsies are you?” “Oh! mendui shom bori chovihani!” cried L., laughing; “we are a great witch and a wizard, and if you can’t tell me my fortune, I’ll tell yours. Hold out your hand, and cross mine with a dollar, and I’ll tell you as big a lie as you ever penned a galderli Gorgio [a green Gentile].” “Well,” exclaimed the gypsy, “I’ll believe that you can tell fortunes or do anything! Dordi! dordi! but this is wonderful. Yet you’re not the first Romany rani [lady] I ever met. There’s one in Delaware: a boridiri [very great] lady she is, and true Romany,—flick o the jib te rinkeni adosta [quick of tongue and fair of face]. Well, I am glad to see you.” “Who is that talking there?” cried a man’s voice These were very nice people. The old dame took a great liking to L., and showed it in pleasant manners. The couple were both English, and liked to talk with me of the old country and the many mutual friends whom we had left behind. On another visit, L. brought a scarlet silk handkerchief, which she had bound round her head and tied under her chin in a very gypsy manner. It excited, as I anticipated, great admiration from the old dame. “Ah kenna tute dikks rinkeni—now you look nice. That’s the way a Romany lady ought to wear it! Don’t she look just as Alfi used to look?” she cried to her husband. “Just such eyes and hair!” Here L. took off the diklo, or handkerchief, and passed it round the gypsy woman’s head, and tied it under her chin, saying,—
We rose to depart, the old dame offered back to L. her handkerchief, and, on being told to keep it, was greatly pleased. I saw that the way in which it was given had won her heart. “Did you hear what the old woman said while she was telling your fortune?” asked L., after we had left the tent. “Now, I think of it, I remember that she or you had hold of my hand, while I was talking with the old man, and he was making merry with my whisky. I was turned away, and around so that I never noticed what you two were saying.” “She penned your dukkerin, and it was wonderful. She said that she must tell it.” And here L. told me what the old dye had insisted on reading in my hand. It was simply very remarkable, and embraced an apparent knowledge of the past, which would make any credulous person believe in her happy predictions of the future. “Ah, well,” I said, “I suppose the dukk told it to her. She may be an eye-reader. A hint dropped here and there, unconsciously, the expression of the face, and a life’s practice will make anybody a witch. And if there ever was a witch’s eye, she has it.” “I would like to have her picture,” said L., “in that lullo diklo [red handkerchief]. She looked like all the sorceresses of Thessaly and Egypt in one, and, as Bulwer says of the Witch of Vesuvius, was all the more terrible for having been beautiful.” Some time after this we went, with Britannia Lee “Well, are you going to see gypsies?” “We are. We three gypsies be. By the abattoir. Au revoir.” And on we went to the place where I had first found gypsies in America. All was at first so still that it seemed if no one could be camped in the spot. “Se kekno adoi.” (There’s nobody there.) “Dordi!” cried Britannia, “Dikkava me o tuv te tan te wardo. [I see a smoke, a tent, a wagon.] I declare, it is my puro pal, my old friend, W.” And we drew near the tent and greeted its owner, who was equally astonished and delighted at seeing such distinguished Romany tani ranis, or gypsy young ladies, and brought forth his wife and three really beautiful children to do the honors. W. was a good specimen of an American-born gypsy, strong, healthy, clean, and temperate, none the worse for wear in out-of-dooring, through tropical summers and terrible winters. Like all American Romanys, he was more “I shall never forget the first day you came to my camp,” said W. to Britannia. “Ah, you astonished me then. You might have knocked me down with a feather. And I didn’t know what to say. You came in a carriage with two other ladies. And you jumped out first, and walked up to me, and cried, ‘Sa’shan!’ That stunned me, but I answered, ‘Sa’shan.’ Then I didn’t speak Romanes to you, for I didn’t know but what you kept it a secret from the other two ladies, and I didn’t wish to betray you. And when you began to talk it as deep as any old Romany I ever heard, and pronounced it so rich and beautiful, I thought I’d never heard the like. I thought you must be a witch.” “Awer me shom chovihani” (but I am a witch), cried the lady. “Mukka men ja adrÉ o tan.” (Let us go into the tent.) So we entered, and sat round the fire, and asked news of all the wanderers of the roads, and the young ladies, having filled their pockets with sweets, produced them for the children, and we were as much at home as we had ever been in any salon; for it was a familiar scene to us all, though it would, perhaps, have been a strange one to the reader, had “What is the charm of all this?” It is that if one has a soul, and does not live entirely reflected from the little thoughts and little ways of a thousand other little people, it is well to have at all times in his heart some strong hold of nature. No matter how much we may be lost in society, dinners, balls, business, we should never forget that there is an eternal sky with stars over it all, a vast, mysterious earth with terrible secrets beneath us, seas, mountains, rivers, and forests away and around; and that it is from these and what is theirs, and not from gas-lit, stifling follies, that all strength and true beauty must come. To this life, odd as he is, the gypsy belongs, and to be sometimes at home with him by wood and wold takes us for a time from “the world.” If I express myself vaguely and imperfectly, it is only to those who know not the charm of nature, its ineffable soothing sympathy,—its life, its love. Gypsies, like children, feel this enchantment as the older grown do not. To them it is a song without words; would they be happier if the world brought them to know it as words without song, without music or melody? I never read a right old English ballad of sumere when the leaves are grene or the not-broune maid, with its rustling as of sprays quivering to the song of the wode-wale, without thinking or feeling deeply how those who wrote them would have been bound to the Romany. It is ridiculous to say that gypsies are not “educated” No poet has so far set forth the charm of gypsy life better than Lenau has done, in his highly-colored, quickly-expressive ballad of “Die drei Zigeuner,” of which I here give a translation into English and another into Anglo-American Romany.
It was a fine spring noon, and the corner of Fourth and Library streets in Philadelphia was like a rock in the turn of a rapid river, so great was the crowd of busy business men which flowed past. Just out of the current a man paused, put down a parcel which he carried, turned it into a table, placed on it several vials, produced a bundle of hand-bills, and began, in the language of his tribe, to cant—that is, cantare, to sing—the virtues of a medicine which was certainly patent in being spread out by him to extremest thinness. In an instant there were a hundred people round him. He seemed to be well known and waited for. I saw at a glance what he was. The dark eye and brown face indicated a touch of the diddikai, or one with a little gypsy blood in his veins, while his fluent patter and unabashed boldness showed a long familiarity with race-grounds and the road, or with the Cheap-Jack and Dutch auction business, and other pursuits requiring unlimited eloquence and impudence. How many a man of learning, nay of genius, might have paused and envied that vagabond the gifts which were worth so little to their possessor! But what was remarkable about him was that instead of endeavoring to conceal any gypsy “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “I am always sorry to detain a select and genteel audience. But I was detained myself by a very interesting incident. I was invited to lunch with a wealthy German gentleman; a very wealthy German, I say, one of the pillars of your city and front door-step of your council, and who would be the steeple of your exchange, if it had one. And on arriving at his house he remarked, ‘Toctor, by tam you koom yust in goot dime, for mine frau und die cook ish bote fall sick mit some-ding in a hoory, und I kess she’ll die pooty quick-sudden.’ Unfortunately I had with me, gentlemen, but a single dose of my world-famous Gypsy’s Elixir and Romany PharmacopheionepenthÉ. (That is the name, gentlemen, but as I detest quackery I term it simply the Gypsy’s Elixir.) When the German gentleman learned that in all probability but one life could be saved he said, ‘Veil, denn, doctor, subbose you gifes dat dose to de cook. For mine frau ish so goot dat it’s all right mit her. She’s reaty to tie. But de boor gook ish a sinner, ash I knows, und not reaty for de next world. And dere ish no vomans in town dat can gook mine sauer-kraut ash she do.’ Fortunately, gentlemen, I found in an unknown corner of a forgotten pocket an unsuspected bottle of the Gypsy’s Elixir, and both interesting lives were saved with such promptitude, punctuality, neatness and dispatch that the cook proceeded immediately to conclude the preparation of our meal—(thank you sir,—one dollar, if you please, sir. You say I only All of this had been spoken with the utmost volubility. As I listened I almost fancied myself again in England, and at a country fair. Taking in his audience at a glance, I saw his eye rest on me ere it flitted, and he resumed,— “We gypsies are, as you know, a remarkable race, and possessed of certain rare secrets, which have all been formulated, concentrated, dictated, and plenipotentiarated into this idealized Elixir. If I were a mountebank or a charlatan I would claim that it cures a hundred diseases. Charlatan is a French word for a quack. I speak French, gentlemen; I speak nine languages, and can tell you the Hebrew for an old umbrella. The Gypsy’s Elixir cures colds, gout, all nervous affections, with such cutaneous disorders as are diseases of the skin, debility, sterility, hostility, and all the illities that flesh is heir to except what it can’t, such as small-pox and cholera. It has cured cholera, but it don’t claim to do it. Others claim to cure, but can’t. I am not a charlatan, but an Ann-Eliza. That is the difference between me and a lady, as the pig said when he astonished his missus by blushing at her remarks to the postman. (Better have another bottle, sir. Haven’t you the change? Never mind, you can owe me fifty cents. I know a gentleman when I see one.) I was recently Down East in Maine, where they are so patriotic, they all put the stars and stripes into their beds for sheets, have the Fourth of July three hundred and sixty-five times in He run on with his patter for some time in this vein, and sold several vials of his panacea, and then in due time ceased, and went into a bar-room, which I also entered. I found him in what looked like prospective trouble, for a policeman was insisting on purchasing his medicine, and on having one of his hand-bills. He was remonstrating, when I quietly said to him in Romany, “Don’t trouble yourself; you were not making any disturbance.” He took no apparent notice of what I said beyond an almost imperceptible wink, but soon left the room, and when I had followed him into the street, and we were out of ear-shot, he suddenly turned on me and said,— “Well, you are a swell, for a Romany. How do you do it up to such a high peg?” “Do what?” “Do the whole lay,—look so gorgeous?” “Why, I’m no better dressed than you are,—not so well, if you come to that vongree” (waistcoat). “’T isn’t that,—’t isn’t the clothes. It’s the air And while on the way I will explain that my acquaintance was not to be regarded as a real gypsy. He was one of that large nomadic class with a tinge of gypsy blood who have grown up as waifs and strays, and who, having some innate cleverness, do the best they can to live without breaking the law—much. They deserve pity, for they have never been cared for; they owe nothing to society for kindness, and
For he meant Bohemian in its widest and wildest sense, and to him all that was apart from the world was his world, whether it was Rom or Yahudi, and whether it conversed in Romany or Schmussen, or any other tongue unknown to the Gentiles. He had indeed no home, and had never known one. It was not difficult to perceive that the place to which he led me was devoted in the off hours to some other business besides the selling of liquor. It was neat and quiet, in fact rather sleepy; but its card, which was handed to me, stated in a large capital head-line that it was OPEN ALL NIGHT, and that there was pool at all hours. I conjectured that a little game might also be performed there at all hours, and that, like the fountain of Jupiter Ammon, it became livelier as it grew later, and that it certainly would not be on the full boil before midnight. “Scheiker fur mich, der Isch will jain soreff shaskenen” (Beer for me and brandy for him), I said to the landlord, who at once shook my hand and saluted me with Sholem! Even so did Ben Daoud of Jerusalem, not long ago. Ben knew me not, and I was buying a pocket-book of him at his open-air stand in Market Street, and talking German, while he was endeavoring to convince me that I ought to give five cents more for it than I had given for a similar case the “Yes,” resumed the crocus-fakir; “a man must be able to talk English very fluently, pronounce it correctly, and, above all things, keep his temper, if he would do anything that requires chanting or pattering. How did I learn it? A man can learn to do anything when it’s business and his living depends on it. The people who crowd around me in the streets cannot pronounce English decently; not one in a thousand here can say laugh, except as a sheep says it. Suppose that you are a Cheap Jack selling things from a van. About once in an hour some tipsy fellow tries to chaff you. He hears your tongue going, and that sets his off. He hears the people laugh at your jokes, and he wants them to laugh at his. When you say you’re selling to raise money for a burned-out widow, he asks if she isn’t your wife. Then you answer him, ‘No, but the kind-hearted old woman who found you on the door-step and brought you up to the begging business.’ If you say you are selling goods under cost, it’s very likely some yokel will cry out, ‘Stolen, hey?’ And you patter as quick as lightning, ‘Very likely; I thought your wife sold ’em to me too cheap for the good of somebody’s clothes-line.’ If you show yourself his superior in language awd wit, the people will buy better; they always prefer a gentleman to a cad. Bless me! why, a swell in a dress-coat and kid gloves, with good patter and hatter, can
“The last half can be used for anybody. That’s the way the improvisatory business is managed for visitors. Why, it’s the same with fortune-telling. You have noticed that. Well, if the Gorgios had, it would have been all up with the fake long ago. The old woman has the same sort of girls come to her I began to think that the fakir could talk forever and ever faster. If he excelled in his business, he evidently practiced at all times to do so. I intimated as much, and he at once proceeded fluently to illustrate this point also. “You hear men say every day that if they only had an education they would do great things. What it would all come to with most of them is that they would talk so as to shut other men up and astonish ’em. They have not an idea above that. I never had any schooling but the roads and race-grounds, but I can talk the hat off a lawyer, and that’s all I can do. Any man of them could talk well if he tried; but none of them will try, and as they go through life, telling you how clever they’d have been if somebody else had only done something for them, instead of doing something for themselves. So you must be going. Well, I hope I shall see you again. Just come up when you’re going by and say that your wife was raised from the dead by my Elixir, and that it’s the best medicine you ever had. And if you want to see some regular tent gypsies, there’s a camp of them now just four miles from here; real old style I was sorry to read in the newspaper, a few days after, that the fakir had been really arrested and imprisoned for selling a quack medicine. For in this land of liberty it makes an enormous difference whether you sell by advertisement in the newspapers or on the sidewalk, which shows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, even in a republic.
The Weather had put on his very worst clothes, and was never so hard at work for the agricultural interests, or so little inclined to see visitors, as on the Sunday afternoon when I started gypsying. The rain and the wind were fighting one with another, and both with the mud, even as the Jews in Jerusalem fought with themselves, and both with the Romans,—which was the time when the Shaket, or butcher, killed the ox who drank the water which quenched the fire which the reader has often heard all about, yet not knowing, perhaps, that the house which Jack built was the Holy Temple of Jerusalem. It was with such reflections that I beguiled time on a long walk, for which I was not unfitly equipped in corduroy trousers, with a long Ulster and a most disreputable cap befitting a stable-boy. The rig, however, kept out the wet, and I was too recently from England to care much that it was raining. I had seen the sun on color about thirty times altogether during the past year, and so had not as yet learned to miss him. It is on record that when the Shah was in England a lady said to him, “Can it be possible, your highness, that there are in your dominions people who worship the sun?” “Yes,” replied the monarch, musingly; “and so would you, if you could only see him.”
but the presence of the savage who belongs to the scene, and whose being binds the poet to it, and blends him with it as the flux causes the fire to melt the gold? I left the road, turned the corner, and saw before me the low, round tents, with smoke rising from the tops, dark at first and spreading into light gray, like scalp-locks and feathers upon Indian heads. Near them were the gayly-painted vans, in which I at once observed a difference from the more substantial-looking old-country vardo. The whole scene was so English that I felt a flutter at the heart: it was a bit from over the sea; it seemed as if hedge-rows should have been round, and an old Gothic steeple looking over the trees. I thought of the last gypsy camp I had seen near Henley-on-Thames, and wished Plato Buckland were with me to share the fun which one was always sure to have on such an occasion in his eccentric company. But now Plato was, like his father in the song,
and I must introduce myself. There was not a sign of life about, save in a sorrowful hen, who looked as if she felt bitterly what it was to be a Pariah among poultry and a down-pin, and who cluttered as if she might have had a history of being borne from her bower in the dark midnight by desperate African I called in Romany my greeting, and bade somebody come out. And there appeared a powerfully built, dark-browed, good-looking man of thirty, who was as gypsy as Plato himself. He greeted me very civilly, but with some surprise, and asked me what he could do for me. “Ask me in out of the rain, pal,” I replied. “You don’t suppose I’ve come four miles to see you and stop out here, do you?” This was, indeed, reasonable, and I was invited to enter, which I did, and found myself in a scene which would have charmed Callot or Goya. There was no door or window to the black tent; what light there was came through a few rifts and rents and mingled with the dull gleam of a smoldering fire, producing a perfect Rembrandt blending of rosy-red with dreamy half-darkness. It was a real witch-aura, and the denizens were worthy of it. As my eyes gradually grew to the gloom, I saw that on one side four brown old Romany sorceresses were “beshing aprÉ ye pus” (sitting on the straw), as the song has it, with deeper masses of darkness behind them, in which other forms were barely visible. Their black eyes all flashed up together at me, like those of a row of eagles in a cage; and I saw in a second that, with men and all I was in a party who were anything but milksops; Even in a gypsy tent something depends on the style of a self-introduction by a perfect stranger. Stepping forward, I divested myself of my Ulster, and handed it to a nice damsel, giving her special injunction to fold it up and lay it by. My mise en scÈne appeared to meet with approbation, and I stood forth and remarked,— “Here I am, glad to see you; and if you want to see a regular Romany rye [gypsy gentleman], just over from England, now’s your chance. Sarishan!” And I received, as I expected, a cordial welcome. I was invited to sit down and eat, but excused myself as having just come from habben, or food, and settled myself to a cigar. But while everybody was polite, I felt that under it all there was a reserve, a chill. I was altogether too heavy a mystery. I knew my friends, and they did not know me. Something, however, now took place which went far to promote conviviality. The tent-flap was lifted, and there entered an elderly woman, who, as a gypsy, might have been the other four in one, she was so quadruply dark, so fourfold uncanny, so too-too witch-like in her eyes. The others had so far been reserved as to speaking And so we sat and talked on in the monotone in which Romany is generally spoken, like an Indian song, while, like an Indian drum, the rain pattered an accompaniment on the tightly drawn tent. Those who live in cities, and who are always realizing self, and thinking how they think, and are while awake given up to introverting vanity, never live in song. To do this one must be a child, an Indian, a dweller in fields and green forests, a brother of the rain and road-puddles and rolling streams, and a friend of the rustling leaves and the summer orchestra of frogs and crickets and rippling grass. Those who hear this music and think to it never think about it; those who live only in books never sing to it in soul. As there are dreams which will not be remembered or known to reason, so this music shrinks from it. It is wonderful how beauty perishes like a shade-grown “Sossi kair’d tute to av’akai pardel o boro pani?” (And what made you come here across the broad water?) said the good old dame confidentially and kindly, in the same low monotone. “Si lesti chorin a gry?” (Was it stealing a horse?) Dum, dum, dum, patter, patter, dum! played the rain. “Avali I dikked your romus kaliko” (I saw your husband yesterday), remarked some one aside to a girl. Dum, dum, dum, patter, patter, dum! “No, mother deari, it was not a horse, for I am on a better, higher lay.” Dum, dum, dum, patter, patter, dum! “He is a first-rate dog, but mine’s as good.” Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum! “Tacho! There’s money to be made by a gentleman like you by telling fortunes.” “Yes, a five-hundred-dollar hit sometimes. But dye, I work upon a better lay.” Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum! “Perhaps you are a boro drabengro” (a great physician). Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum! “It was away among the rocks that he fell into the reeds, half in the water, and kept still till they went by.” “If any one is ill among you, I may be of use.” Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum! “And what a wind! It blows as if the good Lord were singing! Kushti chirus se atch a-kerri.” (This is a pleasant day to be at home.) Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum! “I thought you were a doctor, for you were going about in the town with the one who sells medicine. I heard of it.” Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum! “Do not hurry away! Come again and see us. I think the Coopers are all out in Ohio.” Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum! The cold wind and slight rain seemed refreshing and even welcome, as I went out into the cold air. The captain showed me his stock of fourteen horses and mules, and we interchanged views as to the best method of managing certain maladies in such stock. I had been most kindly entertained; indeed, with the home kindliness which good people in the country show to some hitherto unseen and unknown relative who descends to them from the great world of the city. Not but that my friends did not know cities and men as well as Ulysses, but even Ulysses sometimes Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum!
This chapter was written by my niece through marriage, Miss Elizabeth Robins. It is a part of an article which was published in “The Century,” and it sets forth certain wanderings in seeking old houses in the city of Philadelphia. All along the lower part of Race Street, saith the lady, are wholesale stores and warehouses of every description. Some carts belonging to one of them had just been unloaded. The stevedores who do this—all negroes—were resting while they waited for the next load. They were great powerful men, selected for their strength, and were of many hues, from cafÉ au lait, or coffee much milked, up to the browned or black-scorched berry itself, while the very athletÆ were coal-black. They wore blue overalls, and on their heads they had thrown old coffee-bags, which, resting on their foreheads, passed behind their ears and hung loosely down their backs. It was in fact the haik or bag-cloak of the East, and it made a wonderfully effective Arab costume. One of them was half leaning, half sitting, on a pile of bags; his Herculean arms were folded, and he had unconsciously assumed an air of dignity and defiance. He might have passed for an African chief. When we see such men in Egypt or other sunny countries outre mer, we become artistically eloquent; but it rarely occurs The mixture of races in our cities is rapidly increasing, and we hardly notice it. Yet it is coming to pass that a large part of our population is German and Irish, and that our streets within ten years have become fuller of Italian fruit dealers and organ-grinders, so that Cives sum Romanus (I am a Roman citizen), when abroad, now means either “I possess a monkey” or “I sell pea-nuts.” Jews from Jerusalem peddle pocket-books on our sidewalks, Chinamen are monoplizing our washing and ironing, while among laboring classes are thousands of Scandinavians, Bohemians, and other Slaves. The prim provincial element which predominated in my younger years is yielding before this influx of foreigners, and Quaker monotony and stern conservatism are vanishing, while Philadelphia becomes year by year more cosmopolite. As we left the handsome negroes and continued our walk on Water Street an Italian passed us. He was indeed very dirty and dilapidated; his clothes were of the poorest, and he carried a rag-picker’s bag over his shoulder; but his face, as he turned it towards us, was really beautiful. “Siete Italiano?” (Are you an Italian?) asked my uncle. “Si, signore” (Yes, sir), he answered, showing all his white teeth, and opening his big brown eyes very wide. “E come lei piace questo paese?” (And how do you like this country?) “Not at all. It is too cold,” was his frank answer, and laughing good-humoredly he continued his search through the gutters. He would have made a good Then along and afar, till we met a woman, decently enough dressed, with jet-black eyes and hair, and looking not unlike a gypsy. “A Romany!” I cried with delight. Her red shawl made me think of gypsies, and when I caught her eye I saw the indescrible flash of the kalorat, or black blood. It is very curious that Hindus, Persians, and gypsies have in common an expression of the eye which distinguishes them from all other Oriental races, and chief in this expression is the Romany. Captain Newbold, who first investigated the gypsies of Egypt, declares that, however disguised, he could always detect them by their glance, which is unlike that of any other human being, though something resembling it is often seen in the ruder type of the rural American. I believe myself that there is something in the gypsy eye which is inexplicable, and which enables its possessor to see farther through that strange mill-stone, the human soul, than I can explain. Any one who has ever seen an old fortune-teller of “the people” keeping some simple-minded maiden by the hand, while she holds her by her glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner, with a basilisk stare, will agree with me. As Scheele de But one glance, and my companion whispered, “Answer me in Romany when I speak, and don’t seem to notice her.” And then, in loud tone, he remarked, while looking across the street,— “Adovo’s a kushto puro rinkeno kÉr adoi.” (That is a nice old pretty house there.) “Avali, rya” (Yes, sir), I replied. There was a perceptible movement by the woman in the red shawl to keep within ear-shot of us. Mine uncle resumed,— “Boro kushto covva se ta rakker a jib te kek Gorgio iinella.” (It’s nice to talk a language that no Gentile knows.) The red shawl was on the trail. “Je crois que Ça mord,” remarked my uncle. We allowed our artist guide to pass on, when, as I expected, I felt a twitch at my outer garment. I turned, and the witch eyes, distended with awe and amazement, were glaring into mine, while she said, in a hurried whisper,— “Wasn’t it Romanes?” “Avah,” I replied, “mendui rakker sarja adovo jib. Butikumi ryeskro lis se denna Gorgines.” (Yes, we always talk that language. Much more genteel it is than English.) “Te adovo wavero rye?” (And that other gentleman?) with a glance of suspicion at our artist friend. “Sar tacho” (He’s all right), remarked mine uncle, which I greatly fear meant, when correctly translated in a Christian sense, “He’s all wrong.” But there “And where are you tannin kenna?” (tenting now), I inquired. “We are not tenting at this time of year; we’re kairin,” i.e., houseing, or home-ing. It is a good verb, and might be introduced into English. “And where is your house?” “There, right by Mammy Sauerkraut’s Row. Come in and sit down.” I need not give the Romany which was spoken, but will simply translate. The house was like all the others. We passed through a close, dark passage, in which lay canvas and poles, a kettle and a sarshta, or the iron which is stuck into the ground, and by which a kettle hangs. The old-fashioned tripod, popularly supposed to be used by gypsies, in all probability never existed, since the Roms of India to-day use the sarshta, as mine uncle tells me he learned from a ci-devant Indian gypsy Dacoit, or wandering thief, who was one of his intimates in London. We entered an inner room, and I was at once struck by its general indescribable unlikeness to ordinary rooms. Architects declare that the type of the tent is to be distinctly found in all Chinese and Arab or Turkish architecture; it is also as marked in a gypsy’s house—when he gets one. This room, which was evidently the common home of a large family, suggested, in its arrangement of furniture and the manner in which its occupants sat around the tent and the wagon. There was a bed, it is true
There was one chair and a saddle, a stove and a chest of drawers. I observed an engraving hanging up which I have several times seen in gypsy tents. It represents a very dark Italian youth. It is a favorite also with Roman Catholics, because the boy has a consecrated medal. The gypsies, however, believe that the boy stole the medal. The Catholics think the picture is that of a Roman boy, because the inscription says so; and the gypsies call it a Romany, so that all are satisfied. There were some eight or nine children in the room, and among them more than one whose resemblance to the dark-skinned saint might have given color enough to the theory that he was
There was also a girl, of the pantherine type, and one damsel of about ten, who had light hair and fair complexion, but whose air was gypsy and whose youthful countenance suggested not the golden, but the brazenest, age of life. Scarcely was I seated in the only chair, when this little maiden, after keenly scrutinizing my appearance, and apparently taking in the situation, came up to me and said,— “Yer come here to have yer fortune told. I’ll tell it to yer for five cents.” “Can tute pen dukkerin aja?” (Can you tell fortunes already?) I inquired. And if that damsel had been lifted at that instant by the hair into the infinite “This here rye” remarked mine uncle, affably, in middle English, “is a hartist. He puts ’is heart into all he does; that’s why. He ain’t Romanes, but he may be trusted. He’s come here, that wot he has, to draw this ’ere Mammy Sauerkraut’s Row, because it’s interestin’. He ain’t a tax-gatherer. We don’t approve o’ payin’ taxes, none of hus. We practices heconomy, and dislike the po-lice. Who was Mammy Sauerkraut?” “I know!” cried the youthful would-be fortune-teller. “She was a witch.” “Tool yer chib!” (Hold your tongue!) cried the parent. “Don’t bother the lady with stories about chovihanis” (witches). “But that’s just what I want to hear!” I cried. “Go on, my little dear, about Mammy Sauerkraut, and you will get your five cents yet, if you only give me enough of it.” “Well, then, Mammy Sauerkraut was a witch, and a little black girl who lives next door told me so. And Mammy Sauerkraut used to change herself into a pig of nights, and that’s why they called her Sauerkraut. This was because they had pig ketchers going about in those times, and once they ketched a pig that belonged to her, and to be revenged on them she used to look like a pig, and they would follow her clear out of town way up the river, and This I thought worthy of the five cents. Then my uncle began to put questions in Romany. “Where is Anselo W.? He that was staruben for a gry?” (imprisoned for a horse). “Staruben apopli.” (Imprisoned again.) “I am sorry for it, sister Nell. He used to play the fiddle well. I wot he was a canty chiel’, and dearly lo’ed the whusky, oh!” “Yes, he was too fond of that. How well he could play!” “Yes,” said my uncle, “he could. And I have sung to his fiddling when the tatto-pani [hot water, i.e., spirits] boiled within us, and made us gay, oh, my golden sister! That’s the way we Hungarian gypsy gentlemen always call the ladies of our people. I sang in Romany.” “I’d like to hear you sing now,” remarked a dark, handsome young man, who had just made a mysterious appearance out of the surrounding shadows. “It’s a kamaben gilli” (a love-song), said the rye; “and it is beautiful, deep old Romanes,—enough to make you cry.” There was the long sound of a violin, clear as the note of a horn. I had not observed that the dark young man had found one to his hand, and, as he accompanied, my uncle sang; and I give the lyric as he afterwards gave it to me, both in Romany and English. As he frankly admitted, it was his own composition.
“Well, that is deep Romanes,” said the woman, admiringly. “It’s beautiful.” “I should think it was,” remarked the violinist. “Why, I didn’t understand more than one half of it. But what I caught I understood.” Which, I reflected, as he uttered it, is perhaps exactly the case with far more than half the readers of all poetry. They run on in a semi-sensuous mental condition, soothed by cadence and lulled by rhyme, reading as they run for want of thought. Are there not poets of the present day who mean that you shall read them thus, and who cast their gold ornaments hollow, as jewelers do, lest they should be too heavy? “My children,” said Meister Karl, “I could go on all day with Romany songs; and I can count up to a hundred in the black language. I know three words for a mouse, three for a monkey, and three for the shadow which falleth at noonday. And I know how to pen dukkerin, lel dudikabin te chiv o manzin aprÉ latti.” “Well, the man who knows that is up to drab [medicine], and hasn’t much more to learn,” said the young man. “When a rye’s a Rom he’s anywhere at home.” “So kushto bak!” (Good luck!) I said, rising to go. “We will come again!” “Yes, we will come again,” said Meister Karl. “Look for me with the roses at the races, and tell me the horse to bet on. You’ll find my patteran [a This bewildering speech was received with admiring awe, and we departed. I should have liked to hear the comments on us which passed that evening among the gypsy denizens of Mammy Sauerkraut’s Row. All the gypsies in the country are not upon the roads. Many of them live in houses, and that very respectably, nay, even aristocratically. Yea, and it may be, O reader, that thou hast met them and knowest them not, any more than thou knowest many other deep secrets of the hearts and lives of those who live around thee. Dark are the ways of the Romany, strange his paths, even when reclaimed from the tent and the van. It is, however, intelligible enough that the Rom converted to the true faith of broadcloth garments by Poole, or dresses by Worth, as well as to the holy gospel of daily baths and savon au violet, should say as little as possible of his origin. For the majority of the world being snobs, they continually insist that all blood unlike their own is base, and the child of the kalorat, knowing this, sayeth naught, and ever carefully keeps the lid of silence on the pot of his birth. And as no being that ever was, is, or will be ever enjoyed holding a secret, playing a part, or otherwise entering into the deepest mystery of life—which is to make a joke of it—so thoroughly as a gypsy, it follows that the being respectable has to him a raciness and drollery and pungency and point which passeth faith. It has often occurred to me, and the older I grow the more I find it true, that the real pleasure which bank presidents, moral politicians, The gypsy of society not always, but yet frequently, retains a keen interest in his wild ancestry. He keeps up the language; it is a delightful secret; he loves now and then to take a look at “the old thing.” Closely allied to the converted sinners are the aficionados, or the ladies and gentlemen born with unconquerable Bohemian tastes, which may be accounted for by their having been themselves gypsies in preËxistent lives. No one can explain how or why it is that the aficion comes upon them. It is in them. I know a very learned man in England, a gentleman of high position, one whose name is familiar to my readers. He could never explain or understand why from early childhood he had felt himself drawn towards the wanderers. When he was only ten years old he saved up all his little store of pence wherewith to pay a tinker to give him lessons in Romany, in which tongue he is now a Past Grand. I know ladies in England and in America, both of the blood and otherwise, who would give up a ball of the highest flight in society, to sit an hour in a gypsy tent, and on whom a whispered word of Romany acts like wild-fire. Great as my experience has been I can really no more explain the intensity of this yearning, this rapport, than I can fly. My own fancy for gypsydom is faint and feeble compared It is apropos of living double lives, and playing parts, and the charm of stealing away unseen, like naughty children, to romp with the tabooed offspring of outlawed neighbors, that I write this, to introduce a letter from a lady, who has kindly permitted me to publish it. It tells its own story of two existences, two souls in one. I give it as it was written, first in Romany, and then in English:—
I have somewhat abbreviated the Romany text of this letter, and Miss Lee herself has somewhat polished and enlarged the translation, which is strictly fit and proper, she being a very different person in English from what she is in gypsy, as are most of her kind. This letter may be, to many, a strange lesson, a quaint essay, a social problem, a fable, an epigram, or a frolic,—just as they choose to take it. To me it is a poem. Thou, my friend, canst easily understand why all that is wild and strange, out-of-doors, far away by night, is worthy of being Tennysoned or Whitmanned. If there be given unto thee stupendous blasted trees, looking in the moonlight like the pillars of a vast and ghostly temple; the fall of cataracts down awful rocks; the wind wailing in wondrous language or whistling Indian melody all night on heath, rocks, and hills, over ancient graves and through lonely caves, bearing with it the hoot of the night-owl; while over all the stars look down in eternal mystery, like eyes reading the great riddle of the night which thou knowest not,—this is to thee like Ariel’s song. To me and to us there are men and women who are in life as the wild river and the night-owl, as the blasted tree and the wind over ancient graves. No man is educated until he has arrived at that state of thought when a picture is quite the same as a book, an old gray-beard jug as a manuscript, men, women, and children as libraries. It was but yester morn that I read a cuneiform inscription I had written the foregoing, and had enveloped and directed it to be mailed, when I met in a lady-book entitled “Magyarland” with the following passages:—
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* * * * * The lady writer of “Magyarland” held in her hand all the while, and knew it not, a beautiful primrose, which might have opened for her the mysterious Romany cavern. On a Danube steamboat she saw a little blind boy sitting all day all alone: only a little Slavonian peasant boy, “an odd, quaint little specimen of humanity, with loose brown garments, cut precisely like those of a grown-up man, and his bits of feet in little raw-hide moccasins.” However, with a “It is not difficult for a Slav to become a poet; he takes in poetic sentiment as a river does water from its source. The first sounds he is conscious of are the words of his mother singing to him as she rocks his cradle. Then, as she watches the dawning of intelligence in his infant face, her mother language is that of poetry, which she improvises at the moment, and though he never saw the flowers nor the snow-capped mountains, nor the flowing streams and rivers, he describes them out of his inner consciousness, and the influence which the varied sounds of nature have upon his mind.” Rock and river and greenwood tree, sweet-spiced spring flower, rustling grass, and bird-singing nature and freedom,—this is the secret of the poets’ song and of the Romany, and there is no other mystery in either. He who sleeps on graves rises mad or a poet; all who lie on the earth, which is the grave and cradle of nature, and who live al fresco, understand gypsies |
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