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The Gypsies

by Charles Godfrey Leland · English · Gutenberg #22939 · 596,831 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Gypsies

Author: Charles Godfrey Leland


        
Release date: October 10, 2007 [eBook #22939]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22939

Credits: Transcribed from the 1882 Houghton, Mifflin and Company edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GYPSIES ***



Transcribed from the 1882 Houghton, Mifflin and Company edition by David
Price, ccx074@pglaf.org





THE GYPSIES


                                    BY
                            CHARLES G. LELAND

    AUTHOR OF "THE ENGLISH GYPSIES AND THEIR LANGUAGE," "ANGLO-ROMANY
                BALLADS," "HANS BREITMANN'S BALLADS," ETC.

                           BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                      HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
                      The Riverside Press, Cambridge

                             Copyright, 1882,
                          BY CHARLES G. LELAND.

                          _All rights reserved_.




PREFACE.


The reader will find in this book sketches of experiences among gypsies
of different nations by one who speaks their language and is conversant
with their ways.  These embrace descriptions of the justly famed musical
gypsies of St. Petersburg and Moscow, by whom the writer was received
literally as a brother; of the Austrian gypsies, especially those
composing the first Romany orchestra of that country, selected by Liszt,
and who played for their friend as they declared they had never played
before for any man; and also of the English, Welsh, Oriental, and
American brethren of the dark blood and the tents.  I believe that the
account of interviews with American gypsies will possess at least the
charm of novelty, but little having as yet been written on this extensive
and very interesting branch of our nomadic population.  To these I have
added a characteristic letter in the gypsy language, with translation by
a lady, legendary stories, poems, and finally the substance of two
papers, one of which I read before the British Philological Society, and
the other before the Oriental Congress at Florence, in 1878.  Those who
study ethnology will be interested to learn from these papers,
subsequently combined in an article in the "Saturday Review," that I have
definitely determined the existence in India of a peculiar tribe of
gypsies, who are _par eminence_ the Romanys of the East, and whose
language is there what it is in England, the same in vocabulary, and the
chief slang of the roads.  This I claim as a discovery, having learned it
from a Hindoo who had been himself a gypsy in his native land.  Many
writers have suggested the Jats, Banjars, and others as probable
ancestors or type-givers of the race; but the existence of the _Rom
himself_ in India, bearing the distinctive name of Rom, has never before
been set forth in any book or by any other writer.  I have also given
what may in reason be regarded as settling the immensely disputed origin
of the word "Zingan," by the gypsies' own account of its etymology, which
was beyond all question brought by them from India.

In addition to this I have given in a chapter certain conversations with
men of note, such as Thomas Carlyle, Lord Lytton, Mr. Roebuck, and
others, on gypsies; an account of the first and family names and personal
characteristics of English and American Romanys, prepared for me by a
very famous old gypsy; and finally a chapter on the "Shelta Thari," or
Tinkers' Language, a very curious jargon or language, never mentioned
before by any writer except Shakespeare.  What this tongue may be, beyond
the fact that it is purely Celtic, and that it does not seem to be
identical with any other Celtic dialect, is unknown to me.  I class it
with the gypsy, because all who speak it are also acquainted with Romany.

For an attempt to set forth the tone or feeling in which the sketches are
conceived, I refer the reader to the Introduction.

When I published my "English Gypsies and their Language," a reviewer
declared that I "had added nothing to our" (that is, his) "knowledge on
the subject."  As it is always pleasant to meet with a man of superior
information, I said nothing.  And as I had carefully read everything ever
printed on the Romany, and had given a very respectable collection of
what was new to me as well as to all my Romany rye colleagues in Europe,
I could only grieve to think that such treasures of learning should thus
remain hidden in the brain of one who had never at any time or in any
other way manifested the possession of any remarkable knowledge.  Nobody
can tell in this world what others may know, but I modestly suggest that
what I have set forth in this work, on the origin of the gypsies, though
it may be known to the reviewer in question, has at least never been set
before the public by anybody but myself, and that it deserves further
investigation.  No account of the tribes of the East mentions the Rom or
Trablus, and yet I have personally met with and thoroughly examined one
of them.  In like manner, the "Shelta Thari" has remained till the
present day entirely unknown to all writers on either the languages or
the nomadic people of Great Britain.  If we are so ignorant of the
wanderers among us, and at our very doors, it is not remarkable that we
should be ignorant of those of India.




INTRODUCTION.


I have frequently been asked, "Why do you take an interest in gypsies?"

And it is not so easy to answer.  Why, indeed?  In Spain one who has been
fascinated by them is called one of the _aficion_, or affection, or
"fancy;" he is an _aficionado_, or affected unto them, and people there
know perfectly what it means, for every Spaniard is at heart a Bohemian.
He feels what a charm there is in a wandering life, in camping in lonely
places, under old chestnut-trees, near towering cliffs, _al pasar del
arroyo_, by the rivulets among the rocks.  He thinks of the wine skin and
wheaten cake when one was hungry on the road, of the mules and tinkling
bells, the fire by night, and the _cigarito_, smoked till he fell asleep.
Then he remembers the gypsies who came to the camp, and the black-eyed
girl who told him his fortune, and all that followed in the rosy dawn and
ever onward into starry night.

    "Y se alegre el alma llena
    De la luz de esos luceros."

    And his heart is filled with rapture
    At the light of those lights above.

This man understands it.  So, too, does many an Englishman.  But I cannot
tell you why.  Why do I love to wander on the roads to hear the birds; to
see old church towers afar, rising over fringes of forest, a river and a
bridge in the foreground, and an ancient castle beyond, with a modern
village springing up about it, just as at the foot of the burg there lies
the falling trunk of an old tree, around which weeds and flowers are
springing up, nourished by its decay?  Why love these better than
pictures, and with a more than fine-art feeling?  Because on the roads,
among such scenes, between the hedge-rows and by the river, I find the
wanderers who properly inhabit not the houses but the scene, not a part
but the whole.  These are the gypsies, who live like the birds and hares,
not of the house-born or the town-bred, but free and at home only with
nature.

I am at some pleasant watering-place, no matter where.  Let it be
Torquay, or Ilfracombe, or Aberystwith, or Bath, or Bournemouth, or
Hastings.  I find out what old churches, castles, towns, towers, manors,
lakes, forests, fairy-wells, or other charms of England lie within twenty
miles.  Then I take my staff and sketch-book, and set out on my day's
pilgrimage.  In the distance lie the lines of the shining sea, with ships
sailing to unknown lands.  Those who live in them are the Bohemians of
the sea, homing while roaming, sleeping as they go, even as gypsies dwell
on wheels.  And if you look wistfully at these ships far off and out at
sea with the sun upon their sails, and wonder what quaint mysteries of
life they hide, verily you are not far from being affected or elected
unto the Romany.  And if, when you see the wild birds on the wing,
wending their way to the South, and wish that you could fly with
them,--anywhere, anywhere over the world and into adventure,--then you
are not far in spirit from the kingdom of Bohemia and its seven castles,
in the deep windows of which AEolian wind-harps sing forever.

Now, as you wander along, it may be that in the wood and by some grassy
nook you will hear voices, and see the gleam of a red garment, and then
find a man of the roads, with dusky wife and child.  You speak one word,
"Sarishan!" and you are introduced.  These people are like birds and
bees, they belong to out-of-doors and nature.  If you can chirp or buzz a
little in their language and know their ways, you will find out, as you
sit in the forest, why he who loves green bushes and mossy rocks is glad
to fly from cities, and likes to be free of the joyous citizenship of the
roads, and everywhere at home in such boon company.

When I have been a stranger in a strange town, I have never gone out for
a long walk without knowing that the chances were that I should meet
within an hour some wanderer with whom I should have in common certain
acquaintances.  These be indeed humble folk, but with nature and summer
walks they make me at home.  In merrie England I could nowhere be a
stranger if I would, and that with people who cannot read; and the
English-born Romany rye, or gentleman speaking gypsy, would in like
manner be everywhere at home in America.  There was a gypsy family always
roaming between Windsor and London, and the first words taught to their
youngest child were "Romany rye!" and these it was trained to address to
me.  The little tot came up to me,--I had never heard her speak
before,--a little brown-faced, black-eyed thing, and said, "How-do, Omany
'eye?" and great was the triumph and rejoicing and laughter of the mother
and father and all the little tribe.  To be familiar with these
wanderers, who live by dale and down, is like having the bees come to
you, as they did to the Dacian damsel, whose death they mourned; it is
like the attraction of the wild deer to the fair Genevieve; or if you
know them to be dangerous outlaws, as some are, it is like the affection
of serpents and other wild things for those whom nature has made their
friends, and who handle them without fear.  They are human, but in their
lives they are between man as he lives in houses and the bee and bird and
fox, and I cannot help believing that those who have no sympathy with
them have none for the forest and road, and cannot be rightly familiar
with the witchery of wood and wold.  There are many ladies and gentlemen
who can well-nigh die of a sunset, and be enraptured with "bits" of
color, and captured with scenes, and to whom all out-of-doors is as
perfect as though it were painted by Millais, yet to whom the bee and
bird and gypsy and red Indian ever remain in their true inner life
strangers.  And just as strange to them, in one sense, are the scenes in
which these creatures dwell; for those who see in them only pictures,
though they be by Claude and Turner, can never behold in them the
fairy-land of childhood.  Only in Ruysdael and Salvator Rosa and the
great unconscious artists lurks the spell of the Romany, and this spell
is unfelt by Mr. Cimabue Brown.  The child and the gypsy have no words in
which to express their sense of nature and its charm, but they have this
sense, and there are very, very few who, acquiring culture, retain it.
And it is gradually disappearing from the world, just as the old
delicately sensuous, naive, picturesque type of woman's beauty--the
perfection of natural beauty--is rapidly vanishing in every country, and
being replaced by the mingled real and unreal attractiveness of
"cleverness," intellect, and fashion.  No doubt the newer tend to higher
forms of culture, but it is not without pain that he who has been "in the
spirit" in the old Sabbath of the soul, and in its quiet, solemn sunset,
sees it all vanishing.  It will all be gone in a few years.  I doubt very
much whether it will be possible for the most unaffectedly natural writer
to preserve any of its hieroglyphics for future Champollions of sentiment
to interpret.  In the coming days, when man shall have developed new
senses, and when the blessed sun himself shall perhaps have been
supplanted by some tremendous electrical light, and the moon be expunged
altogether as interfering with the new arrangements for gravity, there
will doubtless be a new poetry, and art become to the very last degree
self-conscious of its cleverness, artificial and impressional; yet even
then weary scholars will sigh from time to time, as they read in our
books of the ancient purple seas, and how the sun went down of old into
cloud-land, gorgeous land, and then how all dreamed away into night!

Gypsies are the human types of this vanishing, direct love of nature, of
this mute sense of rural romance, and of _al fresco_ life, and he who
does not recognize it in them, despite their rags and dishonesty, need
not pretend to appreciate anything more in Callot's etchings than the
skillful management of the needle and the acids.  Truly they are but rags
themselves; the last rags of the old romance which connected man with
nature.  Once romance was a splendid mediaeval drama, colored and gemmed
with chivalry, minnesong, bandit-flashes, and waving plumes; now there
remain but a few tatters.  Yes, we were young and foolish then, but there
are perishing with the wretched fragments of the red Indian tribes
mythologies as beautiful as those of the Greek or Norseman; and there is
also vanishing with the gypsy an unexpressed mythology, which those who
are to come after us would gladly recover.  Would we not have been
pleased if one of the thousand Latin men of letters whose works have been
preserved had told us how the old Etruscans, then still living in
mountain villages, spoke and habited and customed?  But oh that there had
ever lived of old one man who, noting how feelings and sentiments
changed, tried to so set forth the souls of his time that after-comers
might understand what it was which inspired their art!

In the Sanskrit humorous romance of "Baital Pachisi," or King Vikram and
the Vampire, twenty-five different and disconnected trifling stories
serve collectively to illustrate in the most pointed manner the highest
lesson of wisdom.  In this book the gypsies, and the scenes which
surround them, are intended to teach the lesson of freedom and nature.
Never were such lessons more needed than at present.  I do not say that
culture is opposed to the perception of nature; I would show with all my
power that the higher our culture the more we are really qualified to
appreciate beauty and freedom.  But gates must be opened for this, and
unfortunately the gates as yet are very few, while Philistinism in every
form makes it a business of closing every opening to the true fairy-land
of delight.

The gypsy is one of many links which connect the simple feeling of nature
with romance.  During the Middle Ages thousands of such links and symbols
united nature with religion.  Thus Conrad von Wurtzburg tells in his
"Goldene Schmiede" that the parrot which shines in fairest grass-green
hue, and yet like common grass is never wet, sets forth the Virgin, who
bestowed on man an endless spring, and yet remained unchanged.  So the
parrot and grass and green and shimmering light all blended in the ideal
of the immortal Maid-Mother, and so the bird appears in pictures by Van
Eyck and Durer.  To me the gypsy-parrot and green grass in lonely lanes
and the rain and sunshine all mingle to set forth the inexpressible
purity and sweetness of the virgin parent, Nature.  For the gypsy is
parrot-like, a quaint pilferer, a rogue in grain as in green; for green
was his favorite garb in olden time in England, as it is to-day in
Germany, where he who breaks the Romany law may never dare on heath to
wear that fatal fairy color.

These words are the key to the following book, in which I shall set forth
a few sketches taken during my rambles among the Romany.  The day is
coming when there will be no more wild parrots nor wild wanderers, no
wild nature, and certainly no gypsies.  Within a very few years in the
city of Philadelphia, the English sparrow, the very cit and cad of birds,
has driven from the gardens all the wild, beautiful feathered creatures
whom, as a boy, I knew.  The fire-flashing scarlet tanager and the
humming-bird, the yellow-bird, blue-bird, and golden oriole, are now
almost forgotten, or unknown to city children.  So the people of
self-conscious culture and the mart and factory are banishing the wilder
sort, and it is all right, and so it must be, and therewith _basta_.  But
as a London reviewer said when I asserted in a book that the child was
perhaps born who would see the last gypsy, "Somehow we feel sorry for
that child."




THE RUSSIAN GYPSIES.


It is, I believe, seldom observed that the world is so far from having
quitted the romantic or sentimental for the purely scientific that, even
in science itself, whatever is best set forth owes half its charm to
something delicately and distantly reflected from the forbidden land of
fancy.  The greatest reasoners and writers on the driest topics are still
"genial," because no man ever yet had true genius who did not feel the
inspiration of poetry, or mystery, or at least of the unusual.  We are
not rid of the marvelous or curious, and, if we have not yet a science of
curiosities, it is apparently because it lies for the present distributed
about among the other sciences, just as in small museums illuminated
manuscripts are to be found in happy family union with stuffed birds or
minerals, and with watches and snuff-boxes, once the property of their
late majesties the Georges.  Until such a science is formed, the new one
of ethnology may appropriately serve for it, since it of all presents
most attraction to him who is politely called the general reader, but who
should in truth be called the man who reads the most for mere amusement.
For Ethnology deals with such delightful material as primeval
kumbo-cephalic skulls, and appears to her votaries arrayed, not in silk
attire, but in strange fragments of leather from ancient Irish graves, or
in cloth from Lacustrine villages.  She glitters with the quaint jewelry
of the first Italian race, whose ghosts, if they wail over the "find,"
"speak in a language man knows no more."  She charms us with etchings or
scratchings of mammoths on mammoth-bone, and invites us to explore
mysterious caves, to picnic among megalithic monuments, and speculate on
pictured Scottish stones.  In short, she engages man to investigate his
ancestry, a pursuit which presents charms even to the illiterate, and
asks us to find out facts concerning works of art which have interested
everybody in every age.

_Ad interim_, before the science of curiosities is segregated from that
of ethnology, I may observe that one of the marvels in the latter is
that, among all the subdivisions of the human race, there are only two
which have been, apparently from their beginning, set apart, marked and
cosmopolite, ever living among others, and yet reserved unto themselves.
These are the Jew and the gypsy.  From time whereof history hath naught
to the contrary, the Jew was, as he himself holds in simple faith, the
first man.  Red Earth, Adam, was a Jew, and the old claim to be a
peculiar people has been curiously confirmed by the extraordinary genius
and influence of the race, and by their boundless wanderings.  Go where
we may, we find the Jew--has any other wandered so far?

Yes, one.  For wherever Jew has gone, there, too, we find the gypsy.  The
Jew may be more ancient, but even the authentic origin of the Romany is
lost in ancient Aryan record, and, strictly speaking, his is a
prehistoric caste.  Among the hundred and fifty wandering tribes of India
and Persia, some of them Turanian, some Aryan, and others mixed, it is of
course difficult to identify the exact origin of the European gypsy.  One
thing we know: that from the tenth to the twelfth century, and probably
much later on, India threw out from her northern half a vast multitude of
very troublesome indwellers.  What with Buddhist, Brahman, and Mohammedan
wars,--invaders outlawing invaded,--the number of out-_castes_ became
alarmingly great.  To these the Jats, who, according to Captain Burton,
constituted the main stock of our gypsies, contributed perhaps half their
entire nation.  Excommunication among the Indian professors of
transcendental benevolence meant social death and inconceivable cruelty.
Now there are many historical indications that these outcasts, before
leaving India, became gypsies, which was the most natural thing in a
country where such classes had already existed in very great numbers from
early times.  And from one of the lowest castes, which still exists in
India, and is known as the Dom, {19} the emigrants to the West probably
derived their name and several characteristics.  The Dom burns the dead,
handles corpses, skins beasts, and performs other functions, all of which
were appropriated by, and became peculiar to, gypsies in several
countries in Europe, notably in Denmark and Holland, for several
centuries after their arrival there.  The Dom of the present day also
sells baskets, and wanders with a tent; he is altogether gypsy.  It is
remarkable that he, living in a hot climate, drinks ardent spirits to
excess, being by no means a "temperate Hindoo," and that even in extreme
old age his hair seldom turns white, which is a noted peculiarity among
our own gypsies of pure blood.  I know and have often seen a gypsy woman,
nearly a hundred years old, whose curling hair is black, or hardly
perceptibly changed.  It is extremely probable that the Dom, mentioned as
a caste even in the Shastras, gave the name to the Rom.  The Dom calls
his wife a Domni, and being a Dom is "Domnipana."  In English gypsy, the
same words are expressed by _Rom_, _romni_, and _romnipen_.  D, be it
observed, very often changes to _r_ in its transfer from Hindoo to
Romany.  Thus _doi_, "a wooden spoon," becomes in gypsy _roi_, a term
known to every tinker in London.  But, while this was probably the origin
of the word Rom, there were subsequent reasons for its continuance.
Among the Cophts, who were more abundant in Egypt when the first gypsies
went there, the word for man is _romi_, and after leaving Greece and the
Levant, or _Rum_, it would be natural for the wanderers to be called
_Rumi_.  But the Dom was in all probability the parent stock of the gypsy
race, though the latter received vast accessions from many other sources.
I call attention to this, since it has always been held, and sensibly
enough, that the mere fact of the gypsies speaking Hindi-Persian, or the
oldest type of Urdu, including many Sanskrit terms, does not prove an
Indian or Aryan origin, any more than the English spoken by American
negroes proves a Saxon descent.  But if the Rom can be identified with
the Dom--and the circumstantial evidence, it must be admitted, is very
strong--but little remains to seek, since, according to the Shastras, the
Doms are Hindoo.

Among the tribes whose union formed the European gypsy was, in all
probability, that of the _Nats_, consisting of singing and dancing girls
and male musicians and acrobats.  Of these, we are told that not less
than ten thousand lute-players and minstrels, under the name of _Luri_,
were once sent to Persia as a present to a king, whose land was then
without music or song.  This word _Luri_ is still preserved.  The
saddle-makers and leather-workers of Persia are called Tsingani; they
are, in their way, low caste, and a kind of gypsy, and it is supposed
that from them are possibly derived the names Zingan, Zigeuner, Zingaro,
etc., by which gypsies are known in so many lands.  From Mr. Arnold's
late work on "Persia," the reader may learn that the _Eeli_, who
constitute the majority of the inhabitants of the southern portion of
that country, are Aryan nomads, and apparently gypsies.  There are also
in India the Banjari, or wandering merchants, and many other tribes, all
spoken of as gypsies by those who know them.

As regards the great admixture of Persian with Hindi in good Romany, it
is quite unmistakable, though I can recall no writer who has attached
sufficient importance to a fact which identifies gypsies with what is
almost preeminently the land of gypsies.  I once had the pleasure of
taking a Nile journey in company with Prince S---, a Persian, and in most
cases, when I asked my friend what this or that gypsy word meant, he gave
me its correct meaning, after a little thought, and then added, in his
imperfect English, "What for you want to know such word?--that _old_
word--that no more used.  Only common people--old peasant-woman--use that
word--_gentleman_ no want to know him."  But I did want to know "him"
very much.  I can remember that one night, when our _bon prince_ had thus
held forth, we had dancing girls, or Almeh, on board, and one was very
young and pretty.  I was told that she was gypsy, but she spoke no
Romany.  Yet her panther eyes and serpent smile and _beaute du diable_
were not Egyptian, but of the Indian, _kalo-ratt_,--the dark blood,
which, once known, is known forever.  I forgot her, however, for a long
time, until I went to Moscow, when she was recalled by dancing and
smiles, of which I will speak anon.

I was sitting one day by the Thames, in a gypsy tent, when its master,
Joshua Cooper, now dead, pointing to a swan, asked me for its name in
gypsy.  I replied, "_Boro pappin_."

"No, _rya_.  _Boro pappin_ is 'a big goose.'  _Sakku_ is the real gypsy
word.  It is very old, and very few Romany know it."

A few days after, when my Persian friend was dining with me at the
Langham Hotel, I asked him if he knew what Sakku meant.  By way of reply,
he, not being able to recall the English word, waved his arms in
wonderful pantomime, indicating some enormous winged creature; and then,
looking into the distance, and pointing as if to some far-vanishing
object, as boys do when they declaim Bryant's address "To a Water-Fowl,"
said,--

"Sakku--one ver' big bird, like one _swen_--but he _not_ swen.  He like
the man who carry too much water up-stairs {22} his head in
Constantinople.  That bird all same that man.  He _sakkia_ all same wheel
that you see get water up-stairs in Egypt."

This was explanatory, but far from satisfactory.  The prince, however,
was mindful of me, and the next day I received from the Persian embassy
the word elegantly written in Persian, with the translation, "_a
pelican_."  Then it was all clear enough, for the pelican bears water in
the bag under its bill.  When the gypsies came to Europe they named
animals after those which resembled them in Asia.  A dog they called
_juckal_, from a jackal, and a swan _sakku_, or pelican, because it so
greatly resembles it.  The Hindoo _bandarus_, or monkey, they have
changed to _bombaros_, but why Tom Cooper should declare that it is
_pugasah_, or _pukkus-asa_, I do not know. {23}  As little can I
conjecture the meaning of the prefix _mod_, or _mode_, which I learned on
the road near Weymouth from a very ancient tinker, a man so battered,
tattered, seamed, riven, and wrinkled that he looked like a petrifaction.
He had so bad a barrow, or wheel, that I wondered what he could do with
it, and regarded him as the very poorest man I had ever seen in England,
until his mate came up, an _alter ego_, so excellent in antiquity,
wrinkles, knobbiness, and rags that he surpassed the vagabond pictures
not only of Callot, Dore, and Goya, but even the unknown Spanish maker of
a picture which I met with not long since for sale, and which for
infinite poverty defied anything I ever saw on canvas.  These poor men,
who seemed at first amazed that I should speak to them at all, when I
spoke Romany at once called me "brother."  When I asked the younger his
name, he sank his voice to a whisper, and, with a furtive air, said,--

"_Kamlo_,--Lovel, you know."

"What do you call yourself in the way of business?" I asked.
"_Katsamengro_, I suppose."

Now _Katsamengro_ means scissors-master.

"That is a very good word.  But _chivo_ is deeper."

"_Chivo_ means a knife-man?"

"Yes.  But the deepest of all, master, is _Modangarengro_.  For you see
that the right word for coals isn't _wongur_, as Romanys generally say,
but _Angara_."

Now _angara_, as Pott and Benfey indicate, is pure Sanskrit for coals,
and _angarengro_ is a worker in coals, but what _mod_ means I know not,
and should be glad to be told.

I think it will be found difficult to identify the European gypsy with
any one stock of the wandering races of India.  Among those who left that
country were men of different castes and different color, varying from
the pure northern invader to the negro-like southern Indian.  In the
Danubian principalities there are at the present day three kinds of
gypsies: one very dark and barbarous, another light brown and more
intelligent, and the third, or _elite_, of yellow-pine complexion, as
American boys characterize the hue of quadroons.  Even in England there
are straight-haired and curly-haired Romanys, the two indicating not a
difference resulting from white admixture, but entirely different
original stocks.

It will, I trust, be admitted, even from these remarks, that Romanology,
or that subdivision of ethnology which treats of gypsies, is both
practical and curious.  It deals with the only race except the Jew, which
has penetrated into every village which European civilization has ever
touched.  He who speaks Romany need be a stranger in few lands, for on
every road in Europe and America, in Western Asia, and even in Northern
Africa, he will meet those with whom a very few words may at once
establish a peculiar understanding.  For, of all things believed in by
this widely spread brotherhood, the chief is this,--that he who knows the
_jib_, or language, knows the ways, and that no one ever attained these
without treading strange paths, and threading mysteries unknown to the
Gorgios, or Philistines.  And if he who speaks wears a good coat, and
appears a gentleman, let him rest assured that he will receive the
greeting which all poor relations in all lands extend to those of their
kin who have risen in life.  Some of them, it is true, manifest the
winsome affection which is based on great expectations, a sentiment
largely developed among British gypsies; but others are honestly proud
that a gentleman is not ashamed of them.  Of this latter class were the
musical gypsies, whom I met in Russia during the winter of 1876 and 1877,
and some of them again in Paris during the Exposition of 1878.



ST. PETERSBURG.


There are gypsies and gypsies in the world, for there are the wanderers
on the roads and the secret dwellers in towns; but even among the
_aficionados_, or Romany ryes, by whom I mean those scholars who are fond
of studying life and language from the people themselves, very few have
dreamed that there exist communities of gentlemanly and lady-like gypsies
of art, like the Bohemians of Murger and George Sand, but differing from
them in being real "Bohemians" by race.  I confess that it had never
occurred to me that there was anywhere in Europe, at the present day,
least of all in the heart of great and wealthy cities, a class or caste
devoted entirely to art, well-to-do or even rich, refined in manners,
living in comfortable homes, the women dressing elegantly; and yet with
all this obliged to live by law, as did the Jews once, in Ghettos or in a
certain street, and regarded as outcasts and _cagots_.  I had heard there
were gypsies in Russian cities, and expected to find them like the
_kerengri_ of England or Germany,--house-dwellers somewhat reformed from
vagabondage, but still reckless semi-outlaws, full of tricks and lies; in
a word, _gypsies_, as the world understands the term.  And I certainly
anticipated in Russia something _queer_,--the gentleman who speaks Romany
seldom fails to achieve at least that, whenever he gets into an unbroken
haunt, an unhunted forest, where the Romany rye is unknown,--but nothing
like what I really found.  A recent writer on Russia {26} speaks with
great contempt of these musical Romanys, their girls attired in dresses
by Worth, as compared with the free wild outlaws of the steppes, who,
with dark, ineffable glances, meaning nothing more than a wild-cat's,
steal poultry, and who, wrapped in dirty sheep-skins, proudly call
themselves _Mi dvorane Polaivii_, Lords of the Waste.  The gypsies of
Moscow, who appeared to me the most interesting I have ever met, because
most remote from the Surrey ideal, seemed to Mr. Johnstone to be a kind
of second-rate Romanys or gypsies, gypsified for exhibition, like Mr.
Barnum's negro minstrel, who, though black as a coal by nature, was
requested to put on burnt cork and a wig, that the audience might realize
that they were getting a thoroughly good imitation.  Mr. Johnstone's own
words are that a gypsy maiden in a long _queue_, "which perhaps came from
Worth," is "horrible," "_corruptio optimi pessima est_;" and he further
compares such a damsel to a negro with a cocked hat and spurs.  As the
only negro thus arrayed who presents himself to my memory was one who lay
dead on the battle-field in Tennessee, after one of the bravest
resistances in history, and in which he and his men, not having moved,
were extended in "stark, serried lines" ("ten cart-loads of dead
niggers," said a man to me who helped to bury them), I may be excused for
not seeing the wit of the comparison.  As for the gypsies of Moscow, I
can only say that, after meeting them in public, and penetrating to their
homes, where I was received as one of themselves, even as a Romany, I
found that this opinion of them was erroneous, and that they were
altogether original in spite of being clean, deeply interesting although
honest, and a quite attractive class in most respects, notwithstanding
their ability to read and write.  Against Mr. Johnstone's impressions, I
may set the straightforward and simple result of the experiences of Mr.
W. R. Ralston.  "The gypsies of Moscow," he says, "are justly celebrated
for their picturesqueness and for their wonderful capacity for music.
All who have heard their women sing are enthusiastic about the weird
witchery of the performance."

When I arrived in St. Petersburg, one of my first inquiries was for
gypsies.  To my astonishment, they were hard to find.  They are not
allowed to live in the city; and I was told that the correct and proper
way to see them would be to go at night to certain _cafes_, half an
hour's sleigh-ride from the town, and listen to their concerts.  What I
wanted, however, was not a concert, but a conversation; not gypsies on
exhibition, but gypsies at home,--and everybody seemed to be of the
opinion that those of "Samarcand" and "Dorot" were entirely got up for
effect.  In fact, I heard the opinion hazarded that, even if they spoke
Romany, I might depend upon it they had acquired it simply to deceive.
One gentleman, who had, however, been much with them in other days,
assured me that they were of pure blood, and had an inherited language of
their own.  "But," he added, "I am sure you will not understand it.  You
may be able to talk with those in England, but not with ours, because
there is not a single word in their language which resembles anything in
English, German, French, Latin, Greek, or Italian.  I can only recall,"
he added, "one phrase.  I don't know what it means, and I think it will
puzzle you.  It is _me kamava tut_."

If I experienced internal laughter at hearing this it was for a good
reason, which I can illustrate by an anecdote: "I have often observed,
when I lived in China," said Mr. Hoffman Atkinson, author of "A
Vocabulary of the Yokohama Dialect," "that most young men, particularly
the gay and handsome ones, generally asked me, about the third day after
their arrival in the country, the meaning of the Pidgin-English phrase,
'You makee too muchee lov-lov-pidgin.'  Investigation always established
the fact that the inquirer had heard it from 'a pretty China girl.'  Now
_lov-pidgin_ means love, and _me kamava tut_ is perfectly good gypsy
anywhere for 'I love you;' and a very soft expression it is, recalling
_kama-deva_, the Indian Cupid, whose bow is strung with bees, and whose
name has two strings to it, since it means, both in gypsy and Sanskrit,
Love-God, or the god of love.  'It's _kama-duvel_, you know, _rya_, if
you put it as it ought to be,' said Old Windsor Froggie to me once; 'but
I think that Kama-_devil_ would by rights come nearer to it, if Cupid is
what you mean.'"

I referred the gypsy difficulty to a Russian gentleman of high position,
to whose kindness I had been greatly indebted while in St. Petersburg.
He laughed.

"Come with me to-morrow night to the _cafes_, and see the gypsies; I know
them well, and can promise that you shall talk with them as much as you
like.  Once, in Moscow, I got together all in the town--perhaps a hundred
and fifty--to entertain the American minister, Curtin.  That was a very
hard thing to do,--there was so much professional jealousy among them,
and so many quarrels.  Would you have believed it?"

I thought of the feuds between sundry sturdy Romanys in England, and felt
that I could suppose such a thing, without dangerously stretching my
faith, and I began to believe in Russian gypsies.

"Well, then, I shall call for you to-morrow night with a _troika_; I will
come early,--at ten.  They never begin to sing before company arrive at
eleven, so that you will have half an hour to talk to them."

It is on record that the day on which the general gave me this kind
invitation was the coldest known in St. Petersburg for thirty years, the
thermometer having stood, or rather having lain down and groveled that
morning at 40 degrees below zero, Fahr.  At the appointed hour the
_troika_, or three-horse sleigh, was before the Hotel d'Europe.  It was,
indeed, an arctic night, but, well wrapped in fur-lined _shubas_, with
immense capes which fall to the elbow or rise far above the head, as
required, and wearing fur caps and fur-lined gloves, we felt no cold.
The beard of our _istvostshik_, or driver, was a great mass of ice,
giving him the appearance of an exceedingly hoary youth, and his small
horses, being very shaggy and thoroughly frosted, looked in the darkness
like immense polar bears.  If the general and myself could only have been
considered as gifts of the slightest value to anybody, I should have
regarded our turn-out, with the driver in his sheep-skin coat, as coming
within a miracle of resemblance to that of Santa Claus, the American
Father Christmas.

On, at a tremendous pace, over the snow, which gave out under our runners
that crunching, iron sound only heard when the thermometer touches zero.
There is a peculiar fascination about the _troika_, and the sweetest,
saddest melody and most plaintive song of Russia belong to it.



THE TROIKA.


_Vot y'dit troika udalaiya_.

    Hear ye the troika-bell a-ringing,
       And see the peasant driver there?
    Hear ye the mournful song he's singing,
       Like distant tolling through the air?

    "O eyes, blue eyes, to me so lonely,
       O eyes--alas!--ye give me pain;
    O eyes, that once looked at me only,
       I ne'er shall see your like again.

    "Farewell, my darling, now in heaven,
       And still the heaven of my soul;
    Farewell, thou father town, O Moscow,
       Where I have left my life, my all!"

    And ever at the rein still straining,
       One backward glance the driver gave;
    Sees but once more a green low hillock,
       Sees but once more his loved one's grave.

"_Stoi_!"--Halt!  We stopped at a stylish-looking building, entered a
hall, left our _skubas_, and I heard the general ask, "Are the gypsies
here?"  An affirmative being given, we entered a large room, and there,
sure enough, stood six or eight girls and two men, all very well dressed,
and all unmistakably Romany, though smaller and of much slighter or more
delicate frame than the powerful gypsy "travelers" of England.  In an
instant every pair of great, wild eyes was fixed on me.  The general was
in every way a more striking figure, but I was manifestly a fresh
stranger, who knew nothing of the country, and certainly nothing of
gypsies or gypsydom.  Such a verdant visitor is always most interesting.
It was not by any means my first reception of the kind, and, as I
reviewed at a glance the whole party, I said within myself:--

"Wait an instant, you black snakes, and I will give you something to make
you stare."

This promise I kept, when a young man, who looked like a handsome light
Hindoo, stepped up and addressed me in Russian.  I looked long and
steadily at him before I spoke, and then said:--

"_Latcho divvus prala_!"  (Good day, brother.)

"What is _that_?" he exclaimed, startled.

"_Tu jines latcho adosta_."  (You know very well.)  And then, with the
expression in his face of a man who has been familiarly addressed by a
brazen statue, or asked by a new-born babe, "What o'clock is it?" but
with great joy, he cried:--

"_Romanichal_!"

In an instant they were all around me, marveling greatly, and earnestly
expressing their marvel, at what new species of gypsy I might be; being
in this quite unlike those of England, who, even when they are astonished
"out of their senses" at being addressed in Romany by a gentleman, make
the most red-Indian efforts to conceal their amazement.  But I speedily
found that these Russian gypsies were as unaffected and child-like as
they were gentle in manner, and that they compared with our own
prize-fighting, sturdy-begging, always-suspecting Romany roughs and
_rufianas_ as a delicate greyhound might compare with a very shrewd old
bull-dog, trained by an unusually "fly" tramp.

That the girls were first to the fore in questioning me will be doubted
by no one.  But we had great trouble in effecting a mutual understanding.
Their Romany was full of Russian; their pronunciation puzzled me; they
"bit off their words," and used many in a strange or false sense.  Yet,
notwithstanding this, I contrived to converse pretty readily with the
men,--very readily with the captain, a man as dark as Ben Lee, to those
who know Benjamin, or as mahogany, to those who know him not.  But with
the women it was very difficult to converse.  There is a theory current
that women have a specialty of tact and readiness in understanding a
foreigner, or in making themselves understood; it may be so with
cultivated ladies, but it is my experience that, among the uneducated,
men have a monopoly of such quick intelligence.  In order fully to
convince them that we really had a tongue in common, I repeated perhaps a
hundred nouns, giving, for instance, the names of various parts of the
body, of articles of apparel and objects in the room, and I believe that
we did not find a single word which, when pronounced distinctly by
itself, was not intelligible to us all.  I had left in London a
Russo-Romany vocabulary, once published in "The Asiatic Magazine," and I
had met with Bohtlinghk's article on the dialect, as well as specimens of
it in the works of Pott and Miklosich, but had unfortunately learned
nothing of it from them.  I soon found, however, that I knew a great many
more gypsy words than did my new friends, and that our English Romany far
excels the Russian in _copia verborum_.

"But I must sit down."  I observed on this and other occasions that
Russian gypsies are very naif.  And as it is in human nature to prefer
sitting by a pretty girl, these Slavonian Romanys so arrange it according
to the principles of natural selection--or natural politeness--that, when
a stranger is in their gates, the two prettiest girls in their possession
sit at his right and left, the two less attractive next again, _et
seriatim_.  So at once a damsel of comely mien, arrayed in black silk
attire, of faultless elegance, cried to me, pointing to a chair by her
side, "_Bersh tu alay_, _rya_!"  (Sit down, sir),--a phrase which would
be perfectly intelligible to any Romany in England.  I admit that there
was another damsel, who is generally regarded by most people as the true
gypsy belle of the party, who did not sit by me.  But, as the one who had
"voted herself into the chair," by my side, was more to my liking, being
the most intelligent and most gypsy, I had good cause to rejoice.

I was astonished at the sensible curiosity as to gypsy life in other
lands which was displayed, and at the questions asked.  I really doubt if
I ever met with an English gypsy who cared a farthing to know anything
about his race as it exists in foreign countries, or whence it came.
Once, and once only, I thought I had interested White George, at East
Moulsey, in an account of Egypt, and the small number of Romanys there;
but his only question was to the effect that, if there were so few
gypsies in Egypt, wouldn't it be a good place for him to go to sell
baskets?  These of Russia, however, asked all kinds of questions about
the manners and customs of their congeners, and were pleased when they
recognized familiar traits.  And every gypsyism, whether of word or way,
was greeted with delighted laughter.  In one thing I noted a radical
difference between these gypsies and those of the rest of Europe and of
America.  There was none of that continually assumed mystery and Romany
freemasonry, of superior occult knowledge and "deep" information, which
is often carried to the depths of absurdity and to the height of humbug.
I say this advisedly, since, however much it may give charm to a novel or
play, it is a serious impediment to a philologist.  Let me give an
illustration.

Once, during the evening, these Russian gypsies were anxious to know if
there were any books in their language.  Now I have no doubt that Dr.
Bath Smart, or Prof. E. H. Palmer, or any other of the initiated, will
perfectly understand when I say that by mere force of habit I shivered
and evaded the question.  When a gentleman who manifests a knowledge of
Romany among gypsies in England is suspected of "dixonary" studies, it
amounts to _lasciate ogni speranza_,--give up all hope of learning any
more.

"I'm glad to see you here, _rya_, in my tent," said the before-mentioned
Ben Lee to me one night, in camp near Weybridge, "because I've heard, and
I know, you didn't pick up _your_ Romany out of books."

The silly dread, the hatred, the childish antipathy, real or affected,
but always ridiculous, which is felt in England, not only among gypsies,
but even by many gentlemen scholars, to having the Romany language
published is indescribable.  Vambery was not more averse to show a lead
pencil among Tartars than I am to take notes of words among strange
English gypsies.  I might have spared myself any annoyance from such a
source among the Russian Romanys.  They had not heard of Mr. George
Borrow; nor were there ugly stories current among them to the effect that
Dr. Smart and Prof. E. H. Palmer had published works, the direct result
of which would be to facilitate their little paths to the jail, the
gallows, and the grave.

"Would we hear some singing?"  We were ready, and for the first time in
my life I listened to the long-anticipated, far-famed magical melody of
Russian gypsies.  And what was it like?  May I preface my reply to the
reader with the remark that there are, roughly speaking, two kinds of
music in the world,--the wild and the tame,--and the rarest of human
beings is he who can appreciate both.  Only one such man ever wrote a
book, and his _nomen et omen_ is Engel, like that of the little English
slaves who were _non Angli_, _sed angeli_.  I have in my time been deeply
moved by the choruses of Nubian boatmen; I have listened with great
pleasure to Chinese and Japanese music,--Ole Bull once told me he had
done the same; I have delighted by the hour in Arab songs; and I have
felt the charm of our red-Indian music.  If this seems absurd to those
who characterize all such sound and song as "caterwauling," let me remind
the reader that in all Europe there is not one man fonder of music than
an average Arab, a Chinese, or a red Indian; for any of these people, as
I have seen and know, will sit twelve or fifteen hours, without the least
weariness, listening to what cultivated Europeans all consider as a mere
charivari.  When London gladly endures fifteen-hour concerts, composed of
_morceaux_ by Wagner, Chopin, and Liszt, I will believe that art can
charm as much as nature.

The medium point of intelligence in this puzzle may be found in the
extraordinary fascination which many find in the monotonous tum-tum of
the banjo, and which reappears, somewhat refined, or at least somewhat
Frenchified, in the _Bamboula_ and other Creole airs.  Thence, in an
ascending series, but connected with it, we have old Spanish melodies,
then the Arabic, and here we finally cross the threshold into mystery,
midnight, and "caterwauling."  I do not know that I can explain the fact
why the more "barbarous" music is, the more it is beloved of man; but I
think that the principle of the _refrain_, or repetition in music, which
as yet governs all decorative art and which Mr. Whistler and others are
endeavoring desperately to destroy, acts in music as a sort of animal
magnetism or abstraction, ending in an _extase_.  As for the fascination
which such wild melodies exert, it is beyond description.  The most
enraptured audience I ever saw in my life was at a Coptic wedding in
Cairo, where one hundred and fifty guests listened, from seven P.M. till
three A.M., and Heaven knows how much later, to what a European would
call absolute jangling, yelping, and howling.

The real medium, however, between what I have, for want of better words,
called wild and tame music exists only in that of the Russian gypsies.
These artists, with wonderful tact and untaught skill, have succeeded, in
all their songs, in combining the mysterious and maddening charm of the
true, wild Eastern music with that of regular and simple melody,
intelligible to every Western ear.  I have never listened to the singing
or playing of any distinguished artist--and certainly never of any
far-famed amateur--without realizing that neither words nor melody was of
the least importance, but that the man's manner of performance or display
was everything.  Now, in enjoying gypsy singing, one feels at once as if
the vocalists had entirely forgotten self, and were carried away by the
bewildering beauty of the air and the charm of the words.  There is no
self-consciousness, no vanity,--all is real.  The listener feels as if he
were a performer; the performer is an enraptured listener.  There is no
soulless "art for the sake of art," but art for direct pleasure.

"We intend to sing only Romany for _you_, _rya_," said the young lady to
my left, "and you will hear our real gypsy airs.  The _Gaji_ [Russians]
often ask for songs in our language, and don't get them.  But you are a
Romanichal, and when you go home, far over the _baro kalo pani_ [the
broad black water, that is, the ocean], you shall tell the Romany how we
can sing.  Listen!"

And I listened to the strangest, wildest, and sweetest singing I ever had
heard,--the singing of Lurleis, of sirens, of witches.  First, one
damsel, with an exquisitely clear, firm voice, began to sing a verse of a
love-ballad, and as it approached the end the chorus stole in, softly and
unperceived, but with exquisite skill, until, in a few seconds, the
summer breeze, murmuring melody over a rippling lake, seemed changed to a
midnight tempest, roaring over a stormy sea, in which the _basso_ of the
_kalo shureskro_ (the black captain) pealed like thunder.  Just as it
died away a second girl took up the melody, very sweetly, but with a
little more excitement,--it was like a gleam of moonlight on the still
agitated waters, a strange contralto witch-gleam; and then again the
chorus and the storm; and then another solo yet sweeter, sadder, and
stranger,--the movement continually increasing, until all was fast, and
wild, and mad,--a locomotive quickstep, and then a sudden
silence--sunlight--the storm had blown away.

Nothing on earth is so like magic and elfin-work as when women burst
forth into improvised melody.  The bird only "sings as his bill grew," or
what he learned from the elders; yet when you hear birds singing in
woodland green, throwing out to God or the fairies irrepressible floods
of what seems like audible sunshine, so well does it match with summer's
light, you think it is wonderful.  It is mostly when you forget the long
training of the prima donna, in her ease and apparent naturalness, that
her song is sweetest.  But there is a charm, which was well known of old,
though we know it not to-day, which was practiced by the bards and
believed in by their historians.  It was the feeling that the song was
born of the moment; that it came with the air, gushing and fresh from the
soul.  In reading the strange stories of the professional bards and
scalds and minstrels of the early Middle Age, one is constantly
bewildered at the feats of off-hand composition which were exacted of the
poets among Celts or Norsemen.  And it is evident enough that in some
mysterious way these singers knew how to put strange pressure on the
Muse, and squeeze strains out of her in a manner which would have been
impossible at present.

Yet it lingers here and there on earth among wild, strange people,--this
art of making melody at will.  I first heard it among Nubian boatmen on
the Nile.  It was as manifest that it was composed during the making as
that the singers were unconscious of their power.  One sung at first what
may have been a well-known verse.  While singing, another voice stole in,
and yet another, softly as shadows steal into twilight; and ere I knew it
all were in a great chorus, which fell away as mysteriously, to become
duos, trios,--changing in melody in strange, sweet, fitful wise, as the
faces seen in the golden cloud in the visioned aureole of God blend,
separate, burn, and fade away ever into fresher glory and tints
incarnadined.

Miss C. F. Gordon Cumming, after informing us that "it is utterly
impossible to give you the faintest shadow of an idea of the fascination
of Tahitian _himenes_," proceeds, as men in general and women in
particular invariably do, to give what the writer really believes is a
very good description indeed.  'T is ever thus, and thus 't will ever be,
and the description of these songs is so good that any person gifted with
imagination or poetry cannot fail to smile at the preceding disavowal of
her ability to give an idea.

These _himenes_ are not--and here such of my too expectant young
lady-readers as are careless in spelling will be sadly disappointed--in
any way connected with weddings.  They are simply the natural music of
Tahiti, or strange and beautiful part-songs.  "Nothing you have ever
heard in any other country," says our writer, "bears the slightest
resemblance to these wild, exquisite glees, faultless in time and
harmony, though apparently each singer introduces any variations which
may occur to him or to her.  Very often there is no leader, and
apparently all sing according to their own sweet will.  One voice
commences; it may be that of an old native, with genuine native words
(the meaning of which we had better not inquire), or it may be with a
Scriptural story, versified and sung to an air originally from Europe,
but so completely Tahitianized that no mortal could recognize it, which
is all in its favor, for the wild melodies of this isle are beyond
measure fascinating.

"After one clause of solo, another strikes in--here, there,
everywhere--in harmonious chorus.  It seems as if one section devoted
themselves to pouring forth a rippling torrent of 'Ra, ra, ra--ra--ra!'
while others burst into a flood of 'La, la--la--la--la!'  Some confine
their care to sound a deep, booming bass in a long-continued drone,
somewhat suggestive (to my appreciative Highland ear) of our own
bagpipes.  Here and there high falsetto notes strike in, varied from
verse to verse, and then the choruses of La and Ra come bubbling in
liquid melody, while the voices of the principal singers now join in
unison, now diverge as widely as it is possible for them to do, but all
combine to produce the quaintest, most melodious, rippling glee that ever
was heard."

This is the _himene_; such the singing which I heard in Egypt in a more
regular form; but it was exactly as the writer so admirably sets it forth
(and your description, my lady traveler, is, despite your disavowal,
quite perfect and a _himene_ of itself) that I heard the gypsy girls of
St. Petersburg and of Moscow sing.  For, after a time, becoming jolly as
flies, first one voice began with "La, la, la--la--la!" to an unnamed,
unnamable, charming melody, into which went and came other voices, some
bringing one verse or no verse, in unison or alone, the least expected
doing what was most awaited, which was to surprise us and call forth gay
peals of happy laughter, while the "La, la, la--la--la!" was kept up
continuously, like an accompaniment.  And still the voices, basso,
soprano, tenor, baritone, contralto, rose and fell, the moment's
inspiration telling how, till at last all blended in a locomotive-paced
La, and in a final roar of laughter it ended.

I could not realize at the time how much this exquisite part-singing was
extemporized.  The sound of it rung in my head--I assure you, reader, it
rings there yet when I think of it--like a magic bell.  Another day,
however, when I begged for a repetition of it, the girls could recall
nothing of it.  They could start it again on any air to the unending
strain of "La--la--la;" but _the_ "La--la--la" of the previous evening
was _avec les neiges d'antan_, with the smoke of yesterday's fire, with
the perfume and bird-songs.  "La, la, la--la--la!"

In Arab singing, such effects are applied simply to set forth erotomania;
in negro minstrelsy, they are degraded to the lowest humor; in higher
European music, when employed, they simply illustrate the skill of
composer and musician.  The spirit of gypsy singing recalled by its
method and sweetness that of the Nubian boatmen, but in its _general_
effect I could think only of those strange fits of excitement which
thrill the red Indian and make him burst into song.  The Abbe Domenech
{42} has observed that the American savage pays attention to every sound
that strikes upon his ear when the leaves, softly shaken by the evening
breeze, seem to sigh through the air, or when the tempest, bursting forth
with fury, shakes the gigantic trees that crack like reeds.  "The
chirping of the birds, the cry of the wild beasts, in a word, all those
sweet, grave, or imposing voices that animate the wilderness, are so many
musical lessons, which he easily remembers."  In illustration of this,
the missionary describes the singing of a Chippewa chief, and its wild
inspiration, in a manner which vividly illustrates all music of the class
of which I write.

"It was," he says, "during one of those long winter nights, so monotonous
and so wearisome in the woods.  We were in a wigwam, which afforded us
but miserable shelter from the inclemency of the season.  The storm raged
without; the tempest roared in the open country; the wind blew with
violence, and whistled through the fissures of the cabin; the rain fell
in torrents, and prevented us from continuing our route.  Our host was an
Indian, with sparkling and intelligent eyes, clad with a certain
elegance, and wrapped majestically in a large fur cloak.  Seated close to
the fire, which cast a reddish gleam through the interior of his wigwam,
he felt himself all at once seized with an irresistible desire to imitate
the convulsions of nature, and to sing his impressions.  So, taking hold
of a drum which hung near his bed, he beat a slight rolling, resembling
the distant sounds of an approaching storm; then, raising his voice to a
shrill treble, which he knew how to soften when he pleased, he imitated
the whistling of the air, the creaking of the branches dashing against
one another, and the particular noise produced by dead leaves when
accumulated in compact masses on the ground.  By degrees the rollings of
the drum became more frequent and louder, the chants more sonorous and
shrill, and at last our Indian shrieked, howled, and roared in a most
frightful manner; he struggled and struck his instrument with
extraordinary rapidity.  It was a real tempest, to which nothing was
wanting, not even the distant howling of the dogs, nor the bellowing of
the affrighted buffaloes."

I have observed the same musical inspiration of a storm upon Arabs, who,
during their singing, also accompanied themselves on a drum.  I once
spent two weeks in a Mediterranean steamboat, on board of which were more
than two hundred pilgrims, for the greater part wild Bedouins, going to
Mecca.  They had a minstrel who sang and played on the _darabuka_, or
earthenware drum, and he was aided by another with a simple _nai_, or
reed-whistle; the same orchestra, in fact, which is in universal use
among all red Indians.  To these performers the pilgrims listened with
indescribable pleasure; and I soon found that they regarded me favorably
because I did the same, being, of course, the only Frank on board who
paid any attention to the singing--or any money for it.  But it was at
night and during storms that the spirit of music always seemed to be
strongest on the Arabs, and then, amid roaring of wild waters and
thundering, and in dense darkness, the rolling of the drum and the
strange, bewildering ballads never ceased.  It was the very counterpart,
in all respects, of the Chippewa storm song.

After the first gypsy lyric there came another, to which the captain
especially directed my attention as being what Sam Petulengro calls
"reg'lar Romany."  It was _I rakli adro o lolo gad_ (The girl in the red
chemise), as well as I can recall his words,--a very sweet song, with a
simple but spirited chorus; and as the sympathetic electricity of
excitement seized the performers we were all in a minute "going down the
rapids in a spring freshet."

"_Bagan tu rya_, _bagan_!" (Sing, sir,--sing) cried my handsome neighbor,
with her black gypsy eyes sparkling fire.  "_Jines hi bagan eto_--_eto
latcho Romanes_."  (You can sing that,--it's real Romany.)  It was
evident that she and all were singing with thorough enjoyment, and with a
full and realizing consciousness of gypsyism, being greatly stimulated by
my presence and sympathy.  I felt that the gypsies were taking unusual
pains to please the Romany rye from the _dur' tem_, or far country, and
they had attained the acme of success by being thoroughly delighted with
themselves, which is all that can be hoped for in art, where the aim is
pleasure and not criticism.

There was a pause in the performance, but none in the chattering of the
young ladies, and during this a curious little incident occurred.
Wishing to know if my pretty friend could understand an English gypsy
lyric, I sang in an undertone a ballad, taken from George Borrow's
"Lavengro," and which begins with these words:--

    "Pende Eomani chai ke laki dye;
    'Miri diri dye, mi shom kameli.'"

I never knew whether this was really an old gypsy poem or one written by
Mr. Borrow.  Once, when I repeated it to old Henry James, as he sat
making baskets, I was silenced by being told, "That ain't no real gypsy
_gilli_.  That's one of the kind made up by gentlemen and ladies."
However, as soon as I repeated it, the Russian gypsy girl cried eagerly,
"I know that song!" and actually sang me a ballad which was essentially
the same, in which a damsel describes her fall, owing to a Gajo (Gorgio,
a Gentile,--not gypsy) lover, and her final expulsion from the tent.  It
was adapted to a very pretty melody, and as soon as she had sung it,
_sotto voce_, my pretty friend exclaimed to another girl, "Only think,
the _rye_ from America knows _that_ song!"  Now, as many centuries must
have passed since the English and Russian gypsies parted from the parent
stock, the preservation of this song is very remarkable, and its
antiquity must be very great.  I did not take it down, but any resident
in St. Petersburg can, if so inclined, do so among the gypsies at Dorat,
and verify my statement.

Then there was a pretty dance, of a modified Oriental character, by one
of the damsels.  For this, as for the singing, the only musical
instrument used was a guitar, which had seven strings, tuned in Spanish
fashion, and was rather weak in tone.  I wished it had been a powerful
Panormo, which would have exactly suited the _timbre_ of these voices.
The gypsies were honestly interested in all I could tell them about their
kind in other lands; while the girls were professionally desirous to hear
more Anglo-Romany songs, and were particularly pleased with one beginning
with the words:--

    "'Me shom akonyo,' gildas yoi,
       Men buti ruzhior,
    Te sar i chiriclia adoi
       Pen mengy gilior.'"

Though we "got on" after a manner in our Romany talk, I was often obliged
to have recourse to my friend the general to translate long sentences
into Russian, especially when some sand-bar of a verb or some log of a
noun impeded the current of our conversation.  Finally, a formal request
was made by the captain that I would, as one deep beyond all their
experience in Romany matters, kindly tell them what kind of people they
really were, and whence they came.  With this demand I cheerfully
complied, every word being listened to with breathless interest.  So I
told them what I knew or had conjectured relative to their Indian origin:
how their fathers had wandered forth through Persia; how their travels
could be traced by the Persian, Greek, or Roumanian words in the
language; how in 1417 a band of them appeared in Europe, led by a few men
of great diplomatic skill, who, by crafty dealing, obtained from the
Pope, the Emperor of Germany, and all the kings of Europe, except that of
England, permission to wander for fifty years as pilgrims, declaring that
they had been Christians, but, having become renegades, the King of
Hungary had imposed a penance on them of half a century's exile.  Then I
informed them that precisely the same story had been told by them to the
rulers in Syria and Egypt, only that in the Mohammedan countries they
pretended to be good followers of Islam.  I said there was reason to
believe that some of their people had been in Poland and the other
Slavonic countries ever since the eleventh century, but that those of
England must have gone directly from Eastern Europe to Great Britain;
for, although they had many Slavic words, such as _krallis_ (king) and
_shuba_, there were no French terms, and very few traces of German or
Italian, in the English dialect.  I observed that the men all understood
the geographical allusions which I made, knowing apparently where India,
Persia, and Egypt were situated--a remarkable contrast to our own English
"travelers," one of whom once informed me that he would like to go "on
the road" in America, "because you know, sir, as America lays along into
France, we could get our French baskets cheaper there."

I found, on inquiry, that the Russian gypsies profess Christianity; but,
as the religion of the Greek church, as I saw it, appears to be
practically something very little better than fetich-worship, I cannot
exalt them as models of evangelical piety.  They are, however, according
to a popular proverb, not far from godliness in being very clean in their
persons; and not only did they appear so to me, but I was assured by
several Russians that, as regarded these singing gypsies, it was
invariably the case.  As for morality in gypsy girls, their principles
are very peculiar.  Not a whisper of scandal attaches to these Russian
Romany women as regards transient amours.  But if a wealthy Russian
gentleman falls in love with one, and will have and hold her permanently,
or for a durable connection, he may take her to his home if she likes
him, but must pay monthly a sum into the gypsy treasury; for these people
apparently form an _artel_, or society-union, like all other classes of
Russians.  It may be suggested, as an explanation of this apparent
incongruity, that gypsies all the world over regard steady cohabitation,
or agreement, as marriage, binding themselves, as it were, by
_Gand-harbavivaha_, as the saint married Vasantasena, which is an old
Sanskrit way of wedding.  And let me remark that if one tenth of what I
heard in Russia about "morals" in the highest or lowest or any other
class be true, the gypsies of that country are shining lights and
brilliant exemplars of morality to all by whom they are surrounded.  Let
me also add that never on any occasion did I hear or see among them
anything in the slightest degree improper or unrefined.  I knew very well
that I could, if I chose, talk to such _naive_ people about subjects
which would shock an English lady, and, as the reader may remember, I did
quote Mr. Borrow's song, which he has not translated.  But a European
girl who would have endured allusions to tabooed subjects would have at
all times shown vulgarity or coarseness, while these Russian Romany girls
were invariably lady-like.  It is true that the St. Petersburg party had
a dissipated air; three or four of them looked like second-class French
or Italian theatrical artistes, and I should not be astonished to learn
that very late hours and champagne were familiar to them as cigarettes,
or that their flirtations among their own people were neither faint, nor
few, nor far between.  But their conduct in my presence was
irreproachable.  Those of Moscow, in fact, had not even the apparent
defects of their St. Petersburg sisters and brothers, and when among them
it always seemed to me as if I were simply with nice gentle creoles or
Cubans, the gypsy manner being tamed down to the Spanish level, their
great black eyes and their guitars increasing the resemblance.

The indescribably wild and thrilling character of gypsy music is
thoroughly appreciated by the Russians, who pay very high prices for
Romany performances.  From five to eight or ten pounds sterling is
usually given to a dozen gypsies for singing an hour or two to a special
party, and this is sometimes repeated twice or thrice of an evening.  "A
Russian gentleman, when he is in funds," said the clerk of the Slavansky
Bazaar in Moscow to me, "will make nothing of giving the Zigani a
hundred-ruble note," the ruble rating at half a crown.  The result is
that good singers among these lucky Romanys are well to do, and lead soft
lives, for Russia.



MOSCOW.


I had no friends in Moscow to direct me where to find gypsies _en
famille_, and the inquiries which I made of chance acquaintances simply
convinced me that the world at large was as ignorant of their ways as it
was prejudiced against them.  At last the good-natured old porter of our
hotel told me, in his rough Baltic German, how to meet these mysterious
minstrels to advantage.  "You must take a sleigh," he said, "and go out
to Petrovka.  That is a place in the country, where there are grand
_cafes_ at considerable distances one from the other.  Pay the driver
three rubles for four hours.  Enter a _cafe_, call for something to
drink, listen to the gypsies singing, and when they pass round a plate
put some money in it.  That's all."  This was explicit, and at ten
o'clock in the evening I hired a sleigh and went.

If the cold which I had experienced in the general's troika in St.
Petersburg might be compared to a moderate rheumatism, that which I
encountered in the sleigh outside the walls of Moscow, on Christmas Eve,
1876, was like a fierce gout.  The ride was in all conscience Russian
enough to have its ending among gypsies, Tartars, or Cossacks.  To go at
a headlong pace over the creaking snow behind an _istvostshik_, named
Vassili, the round, cold moon overhead, church-spires tipped with great
inverted golden turnips in the distance, and this on a night when the
frost seemed almost to scream in its intensity, is as much of a sensation
in the suburbs of Moscow as it could be out on the steppes.  A few
wolves, more or less, make no difference,--and even they come sometimes
within three hours' walk of the Kremlin.  _Et ego inter lupos_,--I too
have been among wolves in my time by night, in Kansas, and thought
nothing of such rides compared to the one I had when I went gypsying from
Moscow.

In half an hour Vassili brought me to a house, which I entered.  A "proud
porter," a vast creature, in uniform suggestive of embassies and kings'
palaces, relieved me of my _shuba_, and I found my way into a very large
and high hall, brilliantly lighted as if for a thousand guests, while the
only occupants were four couples, "spooning" _sans gene_, one in each
corner and a small party of men and girls drinking in the middle.  I
called a waiter; he spoke nothing but Russian, and Russian is of all
languages the most useless to him who only talks it "a little."  A little
Arabic, or even a little Chippewa, I have found of great service, but a
fair vocabulary and weeks of study of the grammar are of no avail in a
country where even men of gentlemanly appearance turn away with childish
_ennui_ the instant they detect the foreigner, resolving apparently that
they cannot and _will not_ understand him.  In matters like this the
ordinary Russian is more impatient and less intelligent than any Oriental
or even red Indian.  The result of my interview with the waiter was that
we were soon involved in the completest misunderstanding on the subject
of gypsies.  The question was settled by reference to a fat and fair
damsel, one of the "spoons" already referred to, who spoke German.  She
explained to me that as it was Christmas Eve no gypsies would be there,
or at any other _cafe_.  This was disappointing.  I called Vassili, and
he drove on to another "garden," deeply buried in snow.

When I entered the rooms at this place, I perceived at a glance that
matters had mended.  There was the hum of many voices, and a perfume like
that of tea and many _papiross_, or cigarettes, with a prompt sense of
society and of enjoyment.  I was dazzled at first by the glare of the
lights, and could distinguish nothing, unless it was that the numerous
company regarded me with utter amazement; for it was an "off night," when
no business was expected,--few were there save "professionals" and their
friends,--and I was manifestly an unexpected intruder on Bohemia.  As
luck would have it, that which I believed was the one worst night in the
year to find the gypsy minstrels proved to be the exceptional occasion
when they were all assembled, and I had hit upon it.  Of course this
struck me pleasantly enough as I looked around, for I knew that at a
touch the spell would be broken, and with one word I should have the
warmest welcome from all.  I had literally not a single speaking
acquaintance within a thousand miles, and yet here was a room crowded
with gay and festive strangers, whom the slightest utterance would
convert into friends.

I was not disappointed.  Seeking for an opportunity, I saw a young man of
gentlemanly appearance, well dressed, and with a mild and amiable air.
Speaking to him in German, I asked the very needless question if there
were any gypsies present.

"You wish to hear them sing?" he inquired.

"I do not.  I only want to talk with one,--with _any_ one."

He appeared to be astonished, but, pointing to a handsome, slender young
lady, a very dark brunette, elegantly attired in black silk, said,--

"There is one."

I stepped across to the girl, who rose to meet me.  I said nothing for a
few seconds, but looked at her intently, and then asked,--

"_Rakessa tu Romanes_, _miri pen_?"  (Do you talk Romany, my sister?)

She gave one deep, long glance of utter astonishment, drew one long
breath, and, with a cry of delight and wonder, said,--

"_Romanichal_!"

That word awoke the entire company, and with it they found out who the
intruder was.  "Then might you hear them cry aloud, 'The Moringer is
here!'" for I began to feel like the long-lost lord returned, so warm was
my welcome.  They flocked around me; they cried aloud in Romany, and one
good-natured, smiling man, who looked like a German gypsy, mounting a
chair, waved a guitar by its neck high in the air as a signal of
discovery of a great prize to those at a distance, repeating rapidly,--

"_Av'akai_, _ava'kai_, _Romanichal_!"  (Come here; here's a gypsy!)

And they came, dark and light, great and small, and got round me, and
shook hands, and held to my arms, and asked where I came from, and how I
did, and if it wasn't jolly, and what would I take to drink, and said how
glad they were to see me; and when conversation flagged for an instant,
somebody said to his next neighbor, with an air of wisdom, "American
Romany," and everybody repeated it with delight.  Then it occurred to the
guitarist and the young lady that we had better sit down.  So my first
acquaintance and discoverer, whose name was Liubasha, was placed, in
right of preemption, at my right hand, the _belle des belles_, Miss
Sarsha, at my left, a number of damsels all around these, and then three
or four circles of gypsies, of different ages and tints, standing up,
surrounded us all.  In the outer ring were several fast-looking and
pretty Russian or German blonde girls, whose mission it is, I believe, to
dance--and flirt--with visitors, and a few gentlemanly-looking Russians,
_vieuz garcons_, evidently of the kind who are at home behind the scenes,
and who knew where to come to enjoy themselves.  Altogether there must
have been about fifty present, and I soon observed that every word I
uttered was promptly repeated, while every eye was fixed on me.

I could converse in Romany with the guitarist, and without much
difficulty; but with the charming, heedless young ladies I had as much
trouble to talk as with their sisters in St. Petersburg.  The young
gentleman already referred to, to whom in my fancy I promptly gave the
Offenbachian name of Prince Paul, translated whenever there was a
misunderstanding, and in a few minutes we were all intimate.  Miss
Sarsha, who had a slight cast in one of her wild black eyes, which added
something to the gypsiness and roguery of her smiles, and who wore in a
ring a large diamond, which seemed as if it might be the right eye in the
wrong place, was what is called an earnest young lady, with plenty to say
and great energy wherewith to say it.  What with her eyes, her diamond,
her smiles, and her tongue, she constituted altogether a fine specimen of
irrepressible fireworks, and Prince Paul had enough to do in facilitating
conversation.  There was no end to his politeness, but it was an
impossible task for him now and then promptly to carry over a long
sentence from German to Russian, and he would give it up like an
invincible conundrum, with the patient smile and head-wag and hand-wave
of an amiable Dundreary.  Yet I began to surmise a mystery even in him.
More than once he inadvertently betrayed a knowledge of Romany, though he
invariably spoke of his friends around in a patronizing manner as "these
gypsies."  This was very odd, for in appearance he was a Gorgio of the
Gorgios, and did not seem, despite any talent for languages which he
might possess, likely to trouble himself to acquire Romany while Russian
would answer every purpose of conversation.  All of this was, however,
explained to me afterward.

Prince Paul again asked me if I had come out to hear a concert.  I said,
"No; that I had simply come out to see my brothers and sisters and talk
with them, just as I hoped they would come to see me if I were in my own
country."  This speech produced a most favorable impression, and there
was, in a quiet way, a little private conversation among the leaders,
after which Prince Paul said to me, in a very pleasant manner, that
"these gypsies," being delighted at the visit from the gentleman from a
distant country, would like to offer me a song in token of welcome.  To
this I answered, with many thanks, that such kindness was more than I had
expected, for I was well aware of the great value of such a compliment
from singers whose fame had reached me even in America.  It was evident
that my grain of a reply did not fall upon stony ground, for I never was
among people who seemed to be so quickly impressed by any act of
politeness, however trifling.  A bow, a grasp of the hand, a smile, or a
glance would gratify them, and this gratification their lively black eyes
expressed in the most unmistakable manner.

So we had the song, wild and wonderful like all of its kind, given with
that delightful _abandon_ which attains perfection only among gypsies.  I
had enjoyed the singing in St. Petersburg, but there was a _laisser
aller_, a completely gay spirit, in this Christmas-Eve gypsy party in
Moscow which was much more "whirling away."  For at Dorot the gypsies had
been on exhibition; here at Petrovka they were frolicking _en __famille_
with a favored guest,--a Romany rye from a far land to astonish and
delight,--and he took good care to let them feel that they were achieving
a splendid success, for I declared many times that it was _butsi shukar_,
or very beautiful.  Then I called for tea and lemon, and after that the
gypsies sang for their own amusement, Miss Sarsha, as the incarnation of
fun and jollity, taking the lead, and making me join in.  Then the crowd
made way, and in the space appeared a very pretty little girl, in the
graceful old gypsy Oriental dress.  This child danced charmingly indeed,
in a style strikingly like that of the Almeh of Egypt, but without any of
the erotic expressions which abound in Eastern pantomime.  This little
Romany girl was to me enchanting, being altogether unaffected and
graceful.  It was evident that her dancing, like the singing of her elder
sisters, was not an art which had been drilled in by instruction.  They
had come into it in infancy, and perfected themselves by such continual
practice that what they did was as natural as walking or talking.  When
the dancing was over, I begged that the little girl would come to me,
and, kissing her tiny gypsy hand, I said, "_Spassibo tute kamli_, _eto hi
butsi shukar_" (Thank you, dear; that is very pretty), with which the
rest were evidently pleased.  I had observed among the singers, at a
little distance, a very remarkable and rather handsome old woman,--a good
study for an artist,--and she, as I also noticed, had sung with a
powerful and clear voice.  "She is our grandmother," said one of the
girls.  Now, as every student of gypsies knows, the first thing to do in
England or Germany, on entering a tent-gypsy encampment, is to be polite
to "the old woman."  Unless you can win her good opinion you had better
be gone.  The Russian city Roms have apparently no such fancies.  On the
road, however, life is patriarchal, and the grandmother is a power to be
feared.  As a fortune-teller she is a witch, ever at warfare with the
police world; she has a bitter tongue, and is quick to wrath.  This was
not the style or fashion of the old gypsy singer; but, as soon as I saw
the _puri babali dye_, I requested that she would shake hand with me, and
by the impression which this created I saw that the Romany of the city
had not lost all the feelings of the road.

I spoke of Waramoff's beautiful song of the "Krasneya Sarafan," which
Sarsha began at once to warble.  The characteristic of Russian gypsy-girl
voices is a peculiarly delicate metallic tone,--like that of the two
silver bells of the Tower of Ivan Velikoi when heard from afar,--yet
always marked with fineness and strength.  This is sometimes startling in
the wilder effects, but it is always agreeable.  These Moscow gypsy girls
have a great name in their art, and it was round the shoulders of one of
them--for aught I know it may have been Sarsha's great-grandmother--that
Catalani threw the cashmere shawl which had been given to her by the Pope
as "to the best singer in the world."  "It is not mine by right," said
the generous Italian; "it belongs to the gypsy."

The gypsies were desirous of learning something about the songs of their
kindred in distant lands, and, though no singer, I did my best to please
them, the guitarist easily improvising accompaniments, while the girls
joined in.  As all were in a gay mood faults were easily excused, and the
airs were much liked,--one lyric, set by Virginia Gabriel, being even
more admired in Moscow than in St. Petersburg, apropos of which I may
mention that, when I afterward visited the gypsy family in their own
home, the first request from Sarsha was, "_Eto gilyo_, _rya_!"  (_That_
song, sir), referring to "Romany," which has been heard at several
concerts in London.  And so, after much discussion of the affairs of
Egypt, I took my leave amid a chorus of kind farewells.  Then Vassili,
loudly called for, reappeared from some nook with his elegantly frosted
horse, and in a few minutes we were dashing homeward.  Cold!  It was as
severe as in Western New York or Minnesota, where the thermometer for
many days every winter sinks lower than in St. Petersburg, but where
there are no such incredible precautions taken as in the land of double
windows cemented down, and fur-lined _shubas_.  It is remarkable that the
gypsies, although of Oriental origin, are said to surpass the Russians in
enduring cold; and there is a marvelous story told about a Romany who,
for a wager, undertook to sleep naked against a clothed Muscovite on the
ice of a river during an unusually cold night.  In the morning the
Russian was found frozen stiff, while the gypsy was snoring away
unharmed.  As we returned, I saw in the town something which recalled
this story in more than one _moujik_, who, well wrapped up, lay sleeping
in the open air, under the lee of a house.  Passing through silent Moscow
on the early Christmas morn, under the stars, as I gazed at the marvelous
city, which yields neither to Edinburgh, Cairo, nor Prague in
picturesqueness, and thought over the strange evening I had spent among
the gypsies, I felt as if I were in a melodrama with striking scenery.
The pleasing _finale_ was the utter amazement and almost speechless
gratitude of Vassili at getting an extra half-ruble as an early Christmas
gift.

As I had received a pressing invitation from the gypsies to come again, I
resolved to pay them a visit on Christmas afternoon in their own house,
if I could find it.  Having ascertained that the gypsy street was in a
distant quarter, called the _Grouszini_, I engaged a sleigh, standing
before the door of the Slavanski-Bazaar Hotel, and the usual close
bargain with the driver was effected with the aid of a Russian gentleman,
a stranger passing by, who reduced the ruble (one hundred kopecks) at
first demanded to seventy kopecks.  After a very long drive we found
ourselves in the gypsy street, and the _istvostshik_ asked me, "To what
house?"

"I don't know," I replied.  "Gypsies live here, don't they?"

"Gypsies, and no others."

"Well, I want to find a gypsy."

The driver laughed, and just at that instant I saw, as if awaiting me on
the sidewalk, Sarsha, Liubasha, and another young lady, with a
good-looking youth, their brother.

"This will do," I said to the driver, who appeared utterly amazed at
seeing me greeted like an old friend by the Zigani, but who grinned with
delight, as all Russians of the lower class invariably do at anything
like sociability and fraternity.  The damsels were faultlessly attired in
Russian style, with full fur-lined, glossy black-satin cloaks and fine
Orenberg scarfs, which are, I believe, the finest woolen fabrics in the
world.  The party were particularly anxious to know if I had come
specially to visit _them_, for I have passed over the fact that I had
also made the acquaintance of another very large family of gypsies, who
sang at a rival _cafe_, and who had also treated me very kindly.  I was
at once conducted to a house, which we entered in a rather gypsy way, not
in front, but through a court, a back door, and up a staircase, very much
in the style of certain dwellings in the Potteries in London.  But,
having entered, I was led through one or two neat rooms, where I saw
lying sound asleep on beds, but dressed, one or two very dark Romanys,
whose faces I remembered.  Then we passed into a sitting-room, which was
very well furnished.  I observed hanging up over the chimney-piece a good
collection of photographs, nearly all of gypsies, and indicating that
close resemblance to Hindoos which comes out so strongly in such
pictures, being, in fact, more apparent in the pictures than in the
faces; just as the photographs of the old Ulfilas manuscript revealed
alterations not visible in the original.  In the centre of the group was
a cabinet-size portrait of Sarsha, and by it another of an Englishman of
_very_ high rank.  I thought this odd, but asked no questions.

My hosts were very kind, offering me promptly a rich kind of Russian
cake, begging to know what else I would like to eat or drink, and
apparently deeply concerned that I could really partake of nothing, as I
had just come from luncheon.  They were all light-hearted and gay, so
that the music began at once, as wild and as bewitching as ever.  And
here I observed, even more than before, how thoroughly sincere these
gypsies were in their art, and to what a degree they enjoyed and were
excited by their own singing.  Here in their own home, warbling like
birds and frolicking like children, their performance was even more
delightful than it had been in the concert-room.  There was evidently a
great source of excitement in the fact that I must enjoy it far more than
an ordinary stranger, because I understood Romany, and sympathized with
gypsy ways, and regarded them not as the _Gaji_ or Gentiles do, but as
brothers and sisters.  I confess that I was indeed moved by the simple
kindness with which I was treated, and I knew that, with the wonderfully
keen perception of character in which gypsies excel, they perfectly
understood my liking for them.  It is this ready intuition of feelings
which, when it is raised from an instinct to an art by practice, enables
shrewd old women to tell fortunes with so much skill.

I was here introduced to the mother of the girls.  She was a neat,
pleasant-looking woman, of perhaps forty years, in appearance and manners
irresistibly reminding me of some respectable Cuban lady.  Like the
others, she displayed an intelligent curiosity as to my knowledge of
Romany, and I was pleased at finding that she knew much more of the
language than her children did.  Then there entered a young Russian
gentleman, but not "Prince Paul."  He was, however, a very agreeable
person, as all Russians can be when so minded; and they are always so
minded when they gather, from information or conjecture, the fact that
the stranger whom they meet is one of education or position.  This young
gentleman spoke French, and undertook the part of occasional translator.

I asked Liubasha if any of them understood fortune-telling.

"No; we have quite lost the art of _dorriki_. {61}  None of us know
anything about it.  But we hear that you Romanichals over the Black Water
understand it.  Oh, _rya_," she cried, eagerly, "you know so
much,--you're such a deep Romany,--can't _you_ tell fortunes?"

"I should indeed know very little about Romany ways," I replied, gravely,
"if I could not _pen dorriki_.  But I tell you beforehand, _terni pen_,
'_dorrikipen hi hokanipen_,' little sister, fortune-telling is deceiving.
Yet what the lines say I can read."

In an instant six as pretty little gypsy hands as I ever beheld were
thrust before me, and I heard as many cries of delight.  "Tell _my_
fortune, _rya_! tell mine! and _mine_!" exclaimed the damsels, and I
complied.  It was all very well to tell them there was nothing in it;
they knew a trick worth two of that.  I perceived at once that the faith
which endures beyond its own knowledge was placed in all I said.  In
England the gypsy woman, who at home ridicules her own fortune-telling
and her dupes, still puts faith in a _gusveri mush_, or some "wise man,"
who with crystal or magical apparatus professes occult knowledge; for she
thinks that her own false art is an imitation of a true one.  It is
really amusing to see the reverence with which an old gypsy will look at
the awful hieroglyphics in Cornelius Agrippa's "Occult Philosophy," or,
better still, "Trithemius," and, as a gift, any ordinary fortune-telling
book is esteemed by them beyond rubies.  It is true that they cannot read
it, but the precious volume is treasured like a fetich, and the owner is
happy in the thought of at least possessing darksome and forbidden lore,
though it be of no earthly use to her.  After all the kindness they had
shown me, I could not find it in my heart to refuse to tell these gentle
Zingari their little fortunes.  It is not, I admit, exactly in the order
of things that the chicken should dress the cook, or the Gorgio tell
fortunes to gypsies; but he who wanders in strange lands meets with
strange adventures.  So, with a full knowledge of the legal penalties
attached in England to palmistry and other conjuration, and with the then
pending Slade case knocking heavily on my conscience, I proceeded to
examine and predict.  When I afterward narrated this incident to the late
G. H. Lewes, he expressed himself to the effect that to tell fortunes to
gypsies struck him as the very _ne plus ultra_ of cheek,--which shows how
extremes meet; for verily it was with great modesty and proper diffidence
that I ventured to foretell the lives of these little ladies, having an
antipathy to the practice of chiromancing as to other romancing.

I have observed that as among men of great and varied culture, and of
extensive experience, there are more complex and delicate shades and
half-shades of light in the face, so in the palm the lines are
correspondingly varied and broken.  Take a man of intellect and a
peasant, of equal excellence of figure according to the literal rules of
art or of anatomy, and this subtile multiplicity of variety shows itself
in the whole body in favor of the "gentleman," so that it would almost
seem as if every book we read is republished in the person.  The first
thing that struck me in these gypsy hands was the fewness of the lines,
their clearly defined sweep, and their simplicity.  In every one the line
of life was unbroken, and, in fine, one might think from a drawing of the
hand, and without knowing who its owner might be, that he or she was of a
type of character unknown in most great European cities,--a being gifted
with special culture, and in a certain simple sense refined, but not
endowed with experience in a thousand confused phases of life.  The hands
of a true genius, who has passed through life earnestly devoted to a
single art, however, are on the whole like these of the gypsies.  Such,
for example, are the hands of Fanny Janauschek, the lines of which agree
to perfection with the laws of chiromancy.  The art reminds one of
Cervantes's ape, who told the past and present, but not the future.  And
here "tell me what thou hast been, and I will tell what thou wilt be"
gives a fine opportunity to the soothsayer.

To avoid mistakes I told the fortunes in French, which was translated
into Russian.  I need not say that every word was listened to with
earnest attention, or that the group of dark but young and comely faces,
as they gathered around and bent over, would have made a good subject for
a picture.  After the girls, the mother must needs hear her _dorriki_
also, and last of all the young Russian gentleman, who seemed to take as
earnest an interest in his future as even the gypsies.  As he alone
understood French, and as he appeared to be _un peu gaillard_, and,
finally, as the lines of his hand said nothing to the contrary, I
predicted for him in detail a fortune in which _bonnes fortunes_ were not
at all wanting.  I think he was pleased, but when I asked him if he would
translate what I had said of his future into Russian, he replied with a
slight wink and a scarcely perceptible negative.  I suppose he had his
reasons for declining.

Then we had singing again, and Christopher, the brother, a wild and gay
young gypsy, became so excited that while playing the guitar he also
danced and caroled, and the sweet voices of the girls rose in chorus, and
I was again importuned for the _Romany_ song, and we had altogether a
very Bohemian frolic.  I was sorry when the early twilight faded into
night, and I was obliged, notwithstanding many entreaties to the
contrary, to take my leave.  These gypsies had been very friendly and
kind to me in a strange city, where I had not an acquaintance, and where
I had expected none.  They had given me of their very best; for they gave
me songs which I can never forget, and which were better to me than all
the opera could bestow.  The young Russian, polite to the last, went
bareheaded with me into the street, and, hailing a sleigh-driver, began
to bargain for me.  In Moscow, as in other places, it makes a great
difference in the fare whether one takes a public conveyance from before
the first hotel or from a house in the gypsy quarter.  I had paid seventy
kopecks to come, and I at once found that my new friend and the driver
were engaged in wild and fierce dispute whether I should pay twenty or
thirty to return.

"Oh, give him thirty!" I exclaimed.  "It's little enough."

"_Non_," replied the Russian, with the air of a man of principles.  "_Il
ne faut pas gater ces gens-la_."  But I gave the driver thirty, all the
same, when we got home, and thereby earned the usual shower of blessings.

A few days afterward, while going from Moscow to St. Petersburg, I made
the acquaintance of a young Russian noble and diplomat, who was well
informed on all current gossip, and learned from him some curious facts.
The first young gentleman whom I had seen among the Romanys of Moscow was
the son of a Russian prince by a gypsy mother, and the very noble
Englishman whose photograph I had seen in Sarsha's collection had not
long ago (as rumor averred) paid desperate attentions to the belle of the
Romanys without obtaining the least success.  My informant did not know
her name.  Putting this and that together, I think it highly probable
that Sarsha was the young lady, and that the _latcho bar_, or diamond,
which sparkled on her finger had been paid for with British gold, while
the donor had gained the same "unluck" which befell one of his type in
the Spanish gypsy song as given by George Borrow:--

    "Loud sang the Spanish cavalier,
       And thus his ditty ran:
    'God send the gypsy maiden here,
       But not the gypsy man.'

    "On high arose the moon so bright,
       The gypsy 'gan to sing,
    'I gee a Spaniard coming here,
       I must be on the wing.'"




AUSTRIAN GYPSIES.


I.


In June, 1878, I went to Paris, during the great Exhibition.  I had been
invited by Monsieur Edmond About to attend as a delegate the Congres
Internationale Litteraire, which was about to be held in the great city.
How we assembled, how M. About distinguished himself as one of the most
practical and common-sensible of men of genius, and how we were all
finally harangued by M. Victor Hugo with the most extraordinary display
of oratorical sky-rockets, Catherine-wheels, blue-lights, fire-crackers,
and pin-wheels by which it was ever my luck to be amused, is matter of
history.  But this chapter is only autobiographical, and we will pass
over the history.  As an Anglo-American delegate, I was introduced to
several great men gratis; to the greatest of all I introduced myself at
the expense of half a franc.  This was to the Chinese giant, Chang, who
was on exhibition at a small cafe garden near the Trocadero.  There were
no other visitors in his pavilion when I entered.  He received me with
politeness, and we began to converse in fourth-story English, but
gradually went down-stairs into Pidgin, until we found ourselves fairly
in the kitchen of that humble but entertaining dialect.  It is a
remarkable sensation to sit alone with a mild monster, and feel like a
little boy.  I do not distinctly remember whether Chang is eight, or ten
or twelve feet high; I only know that, though I am, as he said, "one
velly big piecee man," I sat and lifted my eyes from time to time at the
usual level, forgetfully expecting to meet his eyes, and beheld instead
the buttons on his breast.  Then I looked up--like Daruma to Buddha--and
up, and saw far above me his "lights of the soul" gleaming down on me as
it were from the top of a lofty beacon.

I soon found that Chang, regarding all things from a giant's point of
view, esteemed mankind by their size and looks.  Therefore, as he had
complimented me according to his lights, I replied that he was a "numpa
one too muchee glanti handsome man, first chop big."

Then he added, "You belongy Inklis man?"

"No.  My one piecee _fa-ke-kwok_; {69} my Melican, galaw.  You dlinkee
ale some-tim?"

The giant replied that _pay-wine_, which is Pidgin for beer, was not
ungrateful to his palate or foreign to his habits.  So we had a quart of
Alsopp between us, and drank to better acquaintance.  I found that the
giant had exhibited himself in many lands, and taken great pains to learn
the language of each, so that he spoke German, Italian, and Spanish well
enough.  He had been at a mission-school when he used to "stop
China-side," or was in his native land.  I assured him that I had
perceived it from the first, because he evidently "talked ink," as his
countrymen say of words which are uttered by a scholar, and I greatly
gratified him by citing some of my own "beautiful verses," which are
reversed from a Chinese original:--

    "One man who never leadee {69a}
       Like one dly {69b} inkstan be:
    You turn he up-side downy,
       No ink lun {69c} outside he."

So we parted with mutual esteem.  This was the second man by the name of
Chang whom I had known, and singularly enough they were both exhibited as
curiosities.  The other made a living as a Siamese twin, and his brother
was named Eng.  They wrote their autographs for me, and put them wisely
at the very top of the page, lest I should write a promise to pay an
immense sum of money, or forge a free pass to come into the exhibition
gratis over their signatures.

Having seen Chang, I returned to the Hotel de Louvre, dined, and then
went forth with friends to the Orangerie.  This immense garden, devoted
to concerts, beer, and cigars, is said to be capable of containing three
thousand people; before I left it it held about five thousand.  I knew
not why this unwonted crowd had assembled; when I found the cause I was
astonished, with reason.  At the gate was a bill, on which I read "Les
Bohemiennes de Moscow."

"Some small musical comedy, I suppose," I said to myself.  "But let us
see it."  We pressed on.

"Look there!" said my companion.  "Those are certainly gypsies."

Sure enough, a procession of men and women, strangely dressed in gayly
colored Oriental garments, was entering the gates.  But I replied,
"Impossible.  Not here in Paris.  Probably they are performers."

"But see.  They notice you.  That girl certainly knows you.  She's
turning her head.  There,--I heard her say O Romany rye!"

I was bewildered.  The crowd was dense, but as the procession passed me
at a second turn I saw they were indeed gypsies, and I was grasped by the
hand by more than one.  They were my old friends from Moscow.  This
explained the immense multitude.  There was during the Exhibition a great
_furor_ as regarded _les zigains_.  The gypsy orchestra which performed
in the Hungarian cafe was so beset by visitors that a comic paper
represented them as covering the roofs of the adjacent houses so as to
hear something.  This evening the Russian gypsies were to make their
debut in the Orangerie, and they were frightened at their own success.
They sang, but their voices were inaudible to two thirds of the audience,
and those who could not hear roared, "Louder!"  Then they adjourned to
the open air, where the voices were lost altogether on a crowd calling,
"_Garcon_--_vite_--_une tasse cafe_!" or applauding.  In the intervals
scores of young Russian gentlemen, golden swells, who had known the girls
of old, gathered round the fair ones like moths around tapers.  The
singing was not the same as it had been; the voices were the same, but
the sweet wild charm of the Romany caroling, bird-like, for pleasure was
gone.

But I found by themselves and unnoticed two of the troupe, whom I shall
not soon forget.  They were two very handsome youths,--one of sixteen
years, the other twenty.  And with the first words in Romany they fairly
jumped for joy; and the artist who could have caught their picture then
would have made a brave one.  They were clad in blouses of colored silk,
which, with their fine dark complexions and great black eyes, gave them a
very picturesque air.  These had not seen me in Russia, nor had they
heard of me; they were probably from Novogorod.  Like the girls they were
children, but in a greater degree, for they had not been flattered, and
kind words delighted them so that they clapped their hands.  They began
to hum gypsy songs, and had I not prevented it they would have run at
once and brought a guitar, and improvised a small concert for me _al
fresco_.  I objected to this, not wishing to take part any longer in such
a very public exhibition.  For the _gobe-mouches_ and starers, noticing a
stranger talking with _ces zigains_, had begun to gather in a dense crowd
around us, and the two ladies and the gentleman who were with us were
seriously inconvenienced.  We endeavored to step aside, but the multitude
stepped aside also, and would not let us alone.  They were French, but
they might have been polite.  As it was, they broke our merry conference
up effectively, and put us to flight.

"Do let us come and see you, _rya_," said the younger boy.  "We will
sing, for I can really sing beautifully, and we like you so much.  Where
do you live?"

I could not invite them, for I was about to leave Paris, as I then
supposed.  I have never seen them since, and there was no adventure and
no strange scenery beyond the thousands of lights and guests and trees
and voices speaking French.  Yet to this day the gay boyishness, the
merry laughter, and the child-like _naivete_ of the promptly-formed
liking of those gypsy youths remains impressed on my mind with all the
color and warmth of an adventure or a living poem.  Can you recall no
child by any wayside of life to whom you have given a chance smile or a
kind word, and been repaid with artless sudden attraction?  For to all of
us,--yes, to the coldest and worst,--there are such memories of young
people, of children, and I pity him who, remembering them, does not feel
the touch of a vanished hand and hear a chord which is still.  There are
adventures which we can tell to others as stories, but the best have no
story; they may be only the memory of a strange dog which followed us,
and I have one such of a cat who, without any introduction, leaped wildly
towards me, "and would not thence away."  It is a good life which has
many such memories.

I was walking a day or two after with an English friend, who was also a
delegate to the International Literary Congress, in the Exhibition, when
we approached the side gate, or rear entrance of the Hungarian cafe.  Six
or seven dark and strange-looking men stood about, dressed in the uniform
of a military band.  I caught their glances, and saw that they were
Romany.

"Now you shall see something queer," I said to my friend.

So advancing to the first dark man I greeted him in gypsy.

"I do not understand you," he promptly replied--or lied.

I turned to a second.

"You have more sense, and you do understand.  _Adro miro tem penena mande
o baro rai_."  (In my country the gypsies call me the great gentleman.)

This phrase may be translated to mean either the "tall gentleman" or the
"great lord."  It was apparently taken in the latter sense, for at once
all the party bowed very low, raising their hands to their foreheads, in
Oriental fashion.

"Hallo!" exclaimed my English friend, who had not understood what I had
said.  "What game is this you are playing on these fellows?"

Up to the front came a superior, the leader of the band.

"Great God!" he exclaimed, "what is this I hear?  This is wonderful.  To
think that there should be anybody here to talk with!  I can only talk
Magyar and Romanes."

"And what do you talk?" I inquired of the first violin.

"_Ich spreche nur Deutsch_!" he exclaimed, with a strong Vienna accent
and a roar of laughter.  "I only talk German."

This worthy man, I found, was as much delighted with my German as the
leader with my gypsy; and in all my experience I never met two beings so
charmed at being able to converse.  That I should have met with them was
of itself wonderful.  Only there was this difference: that the Viennese
burst into a laugh every time he spoke, while the gypsy grew more sternly
solemn and awfully impressive.  There are people to whom mere talking is
a pleasure,--never mind the ideas,--and here I had struck two at once.  I
once knew a gentleman named Stewart.  He was the mayor, first physician,
and postmaster of St. Paul, Minnesota.  While camping out, _en route_,
and in a tent with him, it chanced that among the other gentlemen who had
tented with us there were two terrible snorers.  Now Mr. Stewart had
heard that you may stop a man's snoring by whistling.  And here was a
wonderful opportunity.  "So I waited," he said, "until one man was coming
down with his snore, _diminuendo_, while the other was rising,
_crescendo_, and at the exact point of intersection, _moderato_, I blew
my car-whistle, and so got both birds at one shot.  I stopped them both."
Even as Mayor Stewart had winged his two birds with one ball had I hit my
two peregrines.

"We are now going to perform," said the gypsy captain.  "Will you not
take seats on the platform, and hear us play?"

I did not know it at the time, but I heard afterwards that this was a
great compliment, and one rarely bestowed.  The platform was small, and
we were very near our new friends.  Scarcely had the performance begun
ere I perceived that, just as the gypsies in Russia had sung their best
in my honor, these artists were exerting themselves to the utmost, and,
all unheeding the audience, playing directly at me and into me.  When any
_tour_ was deftly made the dark master nodded to me with gleaming eyes,
as if saying, "What do you think of _that_, now?"  The Viennese laughed
for joy every time his glance met mine, and as I looked at the various
Lajoshes and Joshkas of the band, they blew, beat, or scraped with
redoubled fury, or sank into thrilling tenderness.  Hurrah! here was
somebody to play to who knew gypsy and all the games thereof; for a very
little, even a word, reveals a great deal, and I must be a virtuoso, at
least by Romany, if not by art.  It was with all the joy of success that
the first piece ended amid thunders of applause.

"That was not the _racoczy_," I said.  "Yet it sounded like it."

"No," said the captain.  "But _now_ you shall hear the _racoczy_ and the
_czardas_ as you never heard them before.  For we can play that better
than any orchestra in Vienna.  Truly, you will never forget us after
hearing it."

And then they played the _racoczy_, the national Hungarian favorite, of
gypsy composition, with heart and soul.  As these men played for me,
inspired with their own music, feeling and enjoying it far more than the
audience, and all because they had got a gypsy gentleman to play to, I
appreciated what a _life_ that was to them, and what it should be; not
cold-blooded skill, aiming only at excellence or preexcellence and at
setting up the artist, but a fire and a joy, a self-forgetfulness which
whirls the soul away as the soul of the Moenad went with the stream adown
the mountains,--_Evoe Bacchus_!  This feeling is deep in the heart of the
Hungarian gypsy; he plays it, he feels it in every air, he knows the rush
of the stream as it bounds onwards,--knows that it expresses his deepest
desire; and so he has given it words in a song which, to him who has the
key, is one of the most touching ever written:--

    "Dyal o pani repedishis,
    M'ro pirano hegedishis;

    "Dyal o pani tale vatra,
    M'ro pirano klanetaha.

    "Dyal o pani pe kishai
    M'ro pirano tsino rai."

    "The stream runs on with rushing din
    As I hear my true love's violin;

    "And the river rolls o'er rock and stone
    As he plays the flute so sweet alone.

    "Runs o'er the sand as it began,
    Then my true love lives a gentleman."

Yes, music whirling the soul away as on a rushing river, the violin notes
falling like ripples, the flute tones all aflow among the rocks; and when
it sweeps _adagio_ on the sandy bed, then the gypsy player is at heart
equal to a lord, then he feels a gentleman.  The only true republic is
art.  There all earthly distinctions pass away; there he is best who
lives and feels best, and makes others feel, not that he is cleverer than
they, but that he can awaken sympathy and joy.

The intense reality of musical art as a comforter to these gypsies of
Eastern Europe is wonderful.  Among certain inedited songs of the
Transylvanian gypsies, in the Kolosvarer dialect, I find the following:--

    "Na janav ko dad m'ro as,
    Niko mallen mange as,
    Miro gule dai merdyas
    Pirani me pregelyas.
    Uva tu o hegedive
    Tu sal mindik pash mange."

    "I've known no father since my birth,
    I have no friend alive on earth;
    My mother's dead this many day,
    The girl I loved has gone her way;
    Thou violin with music free
    Alone art ever true to me."

It is very wonderful that the charm of the Russian gypsy girls' singing
was destroyed by the atmosphere or applause of a Paris concert-room,
while the Hungarian Romanys conquered it as it were by sheer force, and
by conquering gave their music the charm of intensity.  I do not deny
that in this music, be it of voice or instruments, there is much which is
perhaps imagined, which depends on association, which is plain to John
but not to Jack; but you have only to advance or retreat a few steps to
find the same in the highest art.  This, at least, we know: that no
performer at any concert in London can awake the feeling of intense
enjoyment which these wild minstrels excite in themselves and in others
by sympathy.  Now it is a question in many forms as to whether art for
enjoyment is to die, and art for the sake of art alone survive.  Is
joyous and healthy nature to vanish step by step from the heart of man,
and morbid, egoistic pessimism to take its place?  Are over-culture,
excessive sentiment, constant self-criticism, and all the brood of
nervous curses to monopolize and inspire art?  A fine alliance this they
are making, the ascetic monk and the atheistic pessimist, to kill Nature!
They will never effect it.  It may die in many forms.  It may lose its
charm, as the singing of Sarsha and of Liubasha was lost among the
rustling and noise of thousands of Parisian _badauds_ in the Orangerie.
But there will be stronger forms of art, which will make themselves
heard, as the Hungarian Romanys heeded no din, and bore all away with
their music.

"_Latcho divvus miri pralia_!--_miduvel atch pa tumende_!" (Good-day, my
brothers.  God rest on you) I said, and they rose and bowed, and I went
forth into the Exhibition.  It was a brave show, that of all the fine
things from all parts of the world which man can make, but to me the most
interesting of all were the men themselves.  Will not the managers of the
next world show give us a living ethnological department?

Of these Hungarian gypsies who played in Paris during the Exhibition much
was said in the newspapers, and from the following, which appeared in an
American journal, written by some one to me unknown, the reader may learn
that there were many others to whom their music was deeply thrilling or
wildly exciting:--

    "The Hungarian Tziganes (Zigeuner) are the rage just now at Paris.
    The story is that Liszt picked out the individuals composing the band
    one by one from among the gypsy performers in Hungary and Bohemia.
    Half-civilized in appearance, dressed in an unbecoming half-military
    costume, they are nothing while playing Strauss' waltzes or their
    own; but when they play the Radetsky Defile, the Racoksky March, or
    their marvelous czardas, one sees and hears the battle, and it is
    easy to understand the influence of their music in fomenting
    Hungarian revolutions; why for so long it was made treasonable to
    play or listen to these czardas; and why, as they heard them, men
    rose to their feet, gathered together, and with tears rolling down
    their faces, and throats swelling with emotion, departed to do or
    die."

And when I remember that they played for me as they said they had played
for no other man in Paris, "into the ear,"--and when I think of the gleam
in their eyes, I verily believe they _told_ the truth,--I feel glad that
I chanced that morning on those dark men and spoke to them in Romany.

                                * * * * *

Since the above was written I have met in an entertaining work called
"Unknown Hungary," by Victor Tissot, with certain remarks on the
Hungarian gypsy musicians which are so appropriate that I cite them in
full:--

    "The gypsy artists in Hungary play by inspiration, with inimitable
    _verve_ and spirit, without even knowing their notes, and nothing
    whatever of the rhymes and rules of the masters.  Liszt, who has
    closely studied them, says, The art of music being for them a sublime
    language, a song, mystic in itself, though dear to the initiated,
    they use it according to the wants of the moment which they wish to
    express.  They have invented their music for their own use, to sing
    about themselves to themselves, to express themselves in the most
    heartfelt and touching monologues.

    "Their music is as free as their lives; no intermediate modulation,
    no chords, no transition, it goes from one key to another.  From
    ethereal heights they precipitate you into the howling depths of
    hell; from the plaint, barely heard, they pass brusquely to the
    warrior's song, which bursts loudly forth, passionate and tender, at
    once burning and calm.  Their melodies plunge you into a melancholy
    reverie, or carry you away into a stormy whirlwind; they are a
    faithful expression of the Hungarian character, sometimes quick,
    brilliant, and lively, sometimes sad and apathetic.

    "The gypsies, when they arrived in Hungary, had no music of their
    own; they appropriated the Magyar music, and made from it an original
    art which now belongs to them."

I here break in upon Messieurs Tissot and Liszt to remark that, while it
is very probable that the Roms reformed Hungarian music, it is rather
boldly assumed that they had no music of their own.  It was, among other
callings, as dancers and musicians that they left India and entered
Europe, and among them were doubtless many descendants of the ten
thousand Indo-Persian Luris or Nuris.  But to resume quotation:--

    "They made from it an art full of life, passion, laughter, and tears.
    The instrument which the gypsies prefer is the violin, which they
    call _bas' alja_, 'the king of instruments.'  They also play the
    viola, the cymbal, and the clarionet.

    "There was a pause.  The gypsies, who had perceived at a table a
    comfortable-looking man, evidently wealthy, and on a pleasure
    excursion in the town, came down from their platform, and ranged
    themselves round him to give him a serenade all to himself, as is
    their custom.  They call this 'playing into the ear.'

    "They first asked the gentleman his favorite air, and then played it
    with such spirit and enthusiasm and overflowing richness of variation
    and ornament, and with so much emotion, that it drew forth the
    applause of the whole company.  After this they executed a czardas,
    one of the wildest, most feverish, harshest, and, one may say,
    tormenting, as if to pour intoxication into the soul of their
    listener.  They watched his countenance to note the impression
    produced by the passionate rhythm of their instruments; then,
    breaking off suddenly, they played a hushed, soft, caressing measure;
    and again, almost breaking the trembling cords of their bows, they
    produced such an intensity of effect that the listener was almost
    beside himself with delight and astonishment.  He sat as if
    bewitched; he shut his eyes, hung his head in melancholy, or raised
    it with a start, as the music varied; then jumped up and struck the
    back of his head with his hands.  He positively laughed and cried at
    once; then, drawing a roll of bank-notes from his pocket-book, he
    threw it to the gypsies, and fell back in his chair, as if exhausted
    with so much enjoyment.  And in _this_ lies the triumph of the gypsy
    music; it is like that of Orpheus, which moved the rocks and trees.
    The soul of the Hungarian plunges, with a refinement of sensation
    that we can understand, but cannot follow, into this music, which,
    like the unrestrained indulgence of the imagination in fantasy and
    caprice, gives to the initiated all the intoxicating sensations
    experienced by opium smokers."

The Austrian gypsies have many songs which perfectly reflect their
character.  Most of them are only single verses of a few lines, such as
are sung everywhere in Spain; others, which are longer, seem to have
grown from the connection of these verses.  The following translation
from the Roumanian Romany (Vassile Alexandri) gives an idea of their
style and spirit:--


GYPSY SONG.


    The wind whistles over the heath,
    The moonlight flits over the flood;
    And the gypsy lights up his fire,
    In the darkness of the wood.
       Hurrah!
    In the darkness of the wood.

    Free is the bird in the air,
    And the fish where the river flows;
    Free is the deer in the forest,
    And the gypsy wherever he goes.
       Hurrah!
    And the gypsy wherever he goes.

    A GORGIO GENTLEMAN SPEAKS.

    Girl, wilt thou live in my home?
    I will give thee a sable gown,
    And golden coins for a necklace,
    If thou wilt be my own.

    GYPSY GIRL.

    No wild horse will leave the prairie
    For a harness with silver stars;
    Nor an eagle the crags of the mountain,
    For a cage with golden bars;

    Nor the gypsy girl the forest,
    Or the meadow, though gray and cold,
    For garments made of sable,
    Or necklaces of gold.

    THE GORGIO.

    Girl, wilt thou live in my dwelling,
    For pearls and diamonds true? {82}
    I will give thee a bed of scarlet,
    And a royal palace, too.

    GYPSY GIRL.

    My white teeth are my pearlins,
    My diamonds my own black eyes;
    My bed is the soft green meadow,
    My palace the world as it lies.

    Free is the bird in the air,
    And the fish where the river flows;
    Free is the deer in the forest,
    And the gypsy wherever he goes.
       Hurrah!
    And the gypsy wherever he goes.

There is a deep, strange element in the gypsy character, which finds no
sympathy or knowledge in the German, and very little in other Europeans,
but which is so much in accord with the Slavonian and Hungarian that he
who truly feels it with love is often disposed to mingle them together.
It is a dreamy mysticism; an indefinite semi-supernaturalism, often
passing into gloom; a feeling as of Buddhism which has glided into
Northern snows, and taken a new and darker life in winter-lands.  It is
strong in the Czech or Bohemian, whose nature is the worst understood in
the civilized world.  That he should hate the German with all his heart
and soul is in the order of things.  We talk about the mystical Germans,
but German self-conscious mysticism is like a problem of Euclid beside
the natural, unexpressed dreaminess of the Czech.  The German mystic goes
to work at once to expound his "system" in categories, dressing it up in
a technology which in the end proves to be the only mystery in it.  The
Bohemian and gypsy, each in their degrees of culture, form no system and
make no technology, but they feel all the more.  Now the difference
between true and imitative mysticism is that the former takes no form; it
is even narrowed by religious creeds, and wing-clipt by pious
"illumination."  Nature, and nature alone, is its real life.  It was from
the Southern Slavonian lands that all real mysticism, and all that higher
illumination which means freedom, came into Germany and Europe; and after
all, Germany's first and best mystic, Jacob Bohme, was Bohemian by name,
as he was by nature.  When the world shall have discovered who the as yet
unknown Slavonian German was who wrote all the best part of "Consuelo,"
and who helped himself in so doing from "Der letzte Taborit," by
Herlossohn, we shall find one of the few men who understood the Bohemian.

Once in a while, as in Fanny Janauschek, the Czech bursts out into art,
and achieves a great triumph.  I have seen Rachel and Ristori many a
time, but their best acting was shallow compared to Janauschek's, as I
have seen it in by-gone years, when she played Iphigenia and Medea in
German.  No one save a Bohemian could ever so _intuit_ the gloomy
profundity and unearthly fire of the Colchian sorceress.  These are the
things required to perfect every artist,--above all, the tragic
artist,--that the tree of his or her genius shall not only soar to heaven
among the angels, but also have roots in the depths of darkness and fire;
and that he or she shall play not only to the audience, and in sympathy
with them, but also unto one's self and down to one's deepest dreams.

No one will accuse me of wide discussion or padding who understands my
drift in this chapter.  I am speaking of the gypsy, and I cannot explain
him more clearly than by showing his affinities with the Slavonian and
Magyar, and how, through music and probably in many other ways, he has
influenced them.  As the Spaniard perfectly understands the objective
vagabond side of the Gitano, so the Southeastern European understands the
musical and wild-forest yearnings of the Tsigane.  Both to gypsy and
Slavonian there is that which makes them dream so that even debauchery
has for them at times an unearthly inspiration; and as smoking was
inexpressibly sacred to the red Indians of old, so that when the
Guatemalan Christ harried hell, the demons offered him cigars; in like
manner tipsiness is often to the gypsy and Servian, or Czech, or Croat,
something so serious and impressive that it is a thing not to be lightly
thought of, but to be undertaken with intense deliberation and under due
appreciation of its benefits.

Many years ago, when I had begun to feel this strange element I gave it
expression in a poem which I called "The Bohemian," as expressive of both
gypsy and Slavonian nature:--


THE BOHEMIAN.


    Chces li tajnou vec aneb pravdu vyzvedeti
    Blazen, dite opily clovek o tom umeji povodeti.

    Wouldst thou know a truth or mystery,
    A drunkard, fool, or child may tell it thee

                                                         BOHEMIAN PROVERB.

    And now I'll wrap my blanket o'er me,
       And on the tavern floor I'll lie,
    A double spirit-flask before me,
       And watch my pipe clouds, melting, die.

    They melt and die, but ever darken
       As night comes on and hides the day,
    Till all is black; then, brothers, hearken,
       And if ye can write down my lay.

    In yon long loaf my knife is gleaming,
       Like one black sail above the boat;
    As once at Pesth I saw it beaming,
       Half through a dark Croatian throat.

    Now faster, faster, whirls the ceiling,
       And wilder, wilder, turns my brain;
    And still I'll drink, till, past all feeling,
       My soul leaps forth to light again.

    Whence come these white girls wreathing round me?
       Barushka!--long I thought thee dead;
    Katchenka!--when these arms last bound thee
       Thou laid'st by Rajrad, cold as lead.

    And faster, faster, whirls the ceiling,
       And wilder, wilder, turns my brain;
    And from afar a star comes stealing
       Straight at me o'er the death-black plain.

    Alas! I sink.  My spirits miss me.
       I swim, I shoot from shore to shore!
    Klara! thou golden sister--kiss me!
       I rise--I'm safe--I'm strong once more.

    And faster, faster, whirls the ceiling,
       And wilder, wilder, whirls my brain;
    The star!--it strikes my soul, revealing
       All life and light to me again.

                                  * * * * *

    Against the waves fresh waves are dashing,
       Above the breeze fresh breezes blow;
    Through seas of light new light is flashing,
       And with them all I float and flow.

    Yet round me rings of fire are gleaning,--
       Pale rings of fire, wild eyes of death!
    Why haunt me thus, awake or dreaming?
       Methought I left ye with my breath!

    Ay, glare and stare, with life increasing,
       And leech-like eyebrows, arching in;
    Be, if ye must, my fate unceasing,
       But never hope a fear to win.

    He who knows all may haunt the haunter,
       He who fears naught hath conquered fate;
    Who bears in silence quells the daunter,
       And makes his spoiler desolate.

    O wondrous eyes, of star-like lustre,
       How have ye changed to guardian love!
    Alas! where stars in myriads cluster,
       Ye vanish in the heaven above.

                                  * * * * *

    I hear two bells so softly ringing;
       How sweet their silver voices roll!
    The one on distant hills is ringing,
       The other peals within my soul.

    I hear two maidens gently talking,
       Bohemian maids, and fair to see:
    The one on distant hills is walking,
       The other maiden,--where is she?

    Where is she?  When the moonlight glistens
       O'er silent lake or murmuring stream,
    I hear her call my soul, which listens,
       "Oh, wake no more!  Come, love, and dream!"

    She came to earth, earth's loveliest creature;
       She died, and then was born once more;
    Changed was her race, and changed each feature,
       But yet I loved her as before.

    We live, but still, when night has bound me
       In golden dreams too sweet to last,
    A wondrous light-blue world around me,
       She comes,--the loved one of the past.

    I know not which I love the dearest,
       For both the loves are still the same:
    The living to my life is nearest,
       The dead one feeds the living flame.

    And when the sun, its rose-wine quaffing,
       Which flows across the Eastern deep,
    Awakes us, Klara chides me, laughing,
       And says we love too well in sleep.

    And though no more a Voivode's daughter,
       As when she lived on earth before,
    The love is still the same which sought her,
       And I am true, and ask no more.

                                  * * * * *

    Bright moonbeams on the sea are playing,
       And starlight shines upon the hill,
    And I should wake, but still delaying
       In our old life I linger still.

    For as the wind clouds flit above me,
       And as the stars above them shine,
    My higher life's in those who love me,
       And higher still, our life's divine.

    And thus I raise my soul by drinking,
       As on the tavern floor I lie;
    It heeds not whence begins our thinking
       If to the end its flight is high.

    E'en outcasts may have heart and feeling,
       The blackest wild Tsigan be true,
    And love, like light in dungeons stealing,
       Though bars be there, will still burst through.

It is the reecho of more than one song of those strange lands, of more
than one voice, and of many a melody; and those who have heard them,
though not more distinctly than Francois Villon when he spoke of flinging
the question back by silent lake and streamlet lone, will understand me,
and say it is true to nature.

In a late work on Magyarland, by a lady Fellow of the Carpathian Society,
I find more on Hungarian gypsy music, which is so well written that I
quote fully from it, being of the opinion that one ought, when setting
forth any subject, to give quite as good an opportunity to others who are
in our business as to ourselves.  And truly this lady has felt the charm
of the Tsigan music and describes it so well that one wishes she were a
Romany in language and by adoption, like unto a dozen dames and damsels
whom I know.

    "The Magyars have a perfect passion for this gypsy music, and there
    is nothing that appeals so powerfully to their emotions, whether of
    joy or sorrow.  These singular musicians are, as a rule, well taught,
    and can play almost any music, greatly preferring, however, their own
    compositions.  Their music, consequently, is highly characteristic.
    It is the language of their lives and strange surroundings, a wild,
    weird banshee music: now all joy and sparkle, like sunshine on the
    plains; now sullen, sad, and pathetic by turns, like the wail of a
    crushed and oppressed people,--an echo, it is said, of the minstrelsy
    of the _hegedosok_ or Hungarian bards, but sounding to our ears like
    the more distant echo of that exceeding bitter cry, uttered long
    centuries ago by their forefathers under Egyptian bondage, and borne
    over the time-waves of thousands of years, breaking forth in their
    music of to-day."

Here I interrupt the lady--with all due courtesy--to remark that I cannot
agree with her, nor with her probable authority, Walter Simson, in
believing that the gypsies are the descendants of the mixed races who
followed Moses out of Egypt.  The Rom in Egypt is a Hindoo stranger now,
as he ever was.  But that the echo of centuries of outlawry and
wretchedness and wildness rises and falls, like the ineffable discord in
a wind-harp, in Romany airs is true enough, whatever its origin may have
been.  But I beg pardon, madam,--I interrupted you.

    "The soul-stirring, madly exciting, and martial strains of the
    Racoczys--one of the Revolutionary airs--has just died upon the ear.
    A brief interval of rest has passed.  Now listen with bated breath to
    that recitative in the minor key,--that passionate wail, that
    touching story, the gypsies' own music, which rises and falls on the
    air.  Knives and forks are set down, hands and arms hang listless,
    all the seeming necessities of the moment being either suspended or
    forgotten,--merged in the memories which those vibrations, so akin to
    human language, reawaken in each heart.  Eyes involuntarily fill with
    tears, as those pathetic strains echo back and make present some
    sorrow of long ago, or rouse from slumber that of recent time. . . .

    "And now, the recitative being ended, and the last chord struck, the
    melody begins, of which the former was the prelude.  Watch the
    movements of the supple figure of the first violin, standing in the
    centre of the other musicians, who accompany him softly.  How every
    nerve is _en rapport_ with his instrument, and how his very soul is
    speaking through it!  See how gently he draws the bow across the
    trembling strings, and how lovingly he lays his cheek upon it, as if
    listening to some responsive echo of his heart's inmost feeling, for
    it is his mystic language!  How the instrument lives and answers to
    his every touch, sending forth in turn utterances tender, sad, wild,
    and joyous!  The audience once more hold their breath to catch the
    dying tones, as the melody, so rich, so beautiful, so full of pathos,
    is drawing to a close.  The tension is absolutely painful as the
    gypsy dwells on the last lingering note, and it is a relief when,
    with a loud and general burst of sound, every performer starts into
    life and motion.  _Then_ what crude and wild dissonances are made to
    resolve themselves into delicious harmony!  What rapturous and fervid
    phrases, and what energy and impetuosity, are there in every motion
    of the gypsies' figures, as their dark eyes glisten and emit flashes
    in unison with the tones!"

The writer is gifted in giving words to gypsy music.  One cannot say, as
the inexhaustible Cad writes of Niagara ten times on a page in the
Visitors' Book, that it is indescribable.  I think that if language means
anything this music has been very well described by the writers whom I
have cited.  When I am told that the gypsies' impetuous and passionate
natures make them enter into musical action with heart and soul, I feel
not only the strains played long ago, but also hear therein the horns of
Elfland blowing,--which he who has not heard, of summer days, in the
drone of the bee, by reedy rustling stream, will never know on earth in
any wise.  But once heard it comes ever, as I, though in the city, heard
it last night in the winter wind, with Romany words mingled in wild
refrain:--

    "_Kamava tute_, _miri chelladi_!"



II.  AUSTRIAN GYPSIES IN PHILADELPHIA.


It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, and I was walking down Chestnut Street,
Philadelphia, when I met with three very dark men.

Dark men are not rarities in my native city.  There is, for instance,
Eugene, who has the invaluable faculty of being able to turn his hand to
an infinite helpfulness in the small arts.  These men were darker than
Eugene, but they differed from him in this, that while he is a man of
color, they were not.  For in America the man of Aryan blood, however
dark he may be, is always "off" color, while the lightest-hued quadroon
is always on it.  Which is not the only paradox connected with the
descendants of Africans of which I have heard.

I saw at a glance that these dark men were much nearer to the old Aryan
stock than are even my purely white readers.  For they were more recently
from India, and they could speak a language abounding in Hindi, in pure
old Sanskrit, and in Persian.  Yet they would make no display of it; on
the contrary, I knew that they would be very likely at first to deny all
knowledge thereof, as well as their race and blood.  For they were
gypsies; it was very apparent in their eyes, which had the Gitano gleam
as one seldom sees it in England.  I confess that I experienced a thrill
as I exchanged glances with them.  It was a long time since I had seen a
Romany, and, as usual, I knew that I was going to astonish them.  They
were singularly attired, having very good clothes of a quite theatrical
foreign fashion, bearing silver buttons as large as and of the shape of
hen's eggs.  Their hair hung in black ringlets down their shoulders, and
I saw that they had come from the Austrian Slavonian land.

I addressed the eldest in Italian.  He answered fluently and politely.  I
changed to Ilirski or Illyrian and to Serb, of which I have a few phrases
in stock.  They spoke all these languages fluently, for one was a born
Illyrian and one a Serb.  They also spoke Nemetz, or German; in fact,
everything except English.

"Have you got through all your languages?" I at last inquired.

"Tutte, signore,--all of them."

"Isn't there _one_ left behind, which you have forgotten?  Think a
minute."

"No, signore.  None."

"What, not _one_!  You know so many that perhaps a language more or less
makes no difference to you."

"By the Lord, signore, you have seen every egg in the basket."

I looked him fixedly in the eyes, and said, in a low tone,--

"_Ne rakesa tu Romanes miro prala_?"

There was a startled glance from one to the other, and a silence.  I had
asked him if he could not talk Romany.  And I added,--

"_Won't_ you talk a word with a gypsy brother?"

_That_ moved them.  They all shook my hands with great feeling,
expressing intense joy and amazement at meeting with one who knew them.

"_Mishto hom me dikava tute_."  (I am glad to see you.)  So they told me
how they were getting on, and where they were camped, and how they sold
horses, and so on, and we might have got on much farther had it not been
for a very annoying interruption.  As I was talking to the gypsies, a
great number of men, attracted by the sound of a foreign language,
stopped, and fairly pushed themselves up to us, endeavoring to make it
all out.  When there were at least fifty, they crowded in between me and
the foreigners, so that I could hardly talk to them.  The crowd did not
consist of ordinary people, or snobs.  They were well dressed,--young
clerks, at least,--who would have fiercely resented being told that they
were impertinent.

"Eye-talians, ain't they?" inquired one man, who was evidently zealous in
pursuit of knowledge.

"Why don't you tell us what they are sayin'?"

"What kind of fellers air they, any way?"

I was desirous of going with the Hungarian Roms.  But to walk along
Chestnut Street with an augmenting procession of fifty curious Sunday
promenaders was not on my card.  In fact, I had some difficulty in
tearing myself from the inquisitive, questioning, well-dressed people.
The gypsies bore the pressure with the serene equanimity of cosmopolite
superiority, smiling at provincial rawness.  Even so in China and Africa
the traveler is mobbed by the many, who, there as here, think that "I
want to know" is full excuse for all intrusiveness.  _Q'est tout comme
chez nous_.  I confess that I was vexed, and, considering that it was in
my native city, mortified.

A few days after I went out to the _tan_ where these Roms had camped.
But the birds had flown, and a little pile of ashes and the usual debris
of a gypsy camp were all that remained.  The police told me that they had
some very fine horses, and had gone to the Northwest; and that is all I
ever saw of them.

I have heard of a philanthropist who was turned into a misanthrope by
attempting to sketch in public and in galleries.  Respectable strangers,
even clergymen, would stop and coolly look over his shoulder, and ask
questions, and give him advice, until he could work no longer.  Why is it
that people who would not speak to you for life without an introduction
should think that their small curiosity to see your sketches authorizes
them to act as aquaintances?  Or why is the pursuit of knowledge assumed
among the half-bred to be an excuse for so much intrusion?  "I want to
know."  Well, and what if you do?  The man who thinks that his desire for
knowledge is an excuse for impertinence--and there are too many who act
on this in all sincerity--is of the kind who knocks the fingers off
statues, because "he wants them" for his collection; who chips away
tombstones, and hews down historic trees, and not infrequently steals
outright, and thinks that his pretense of culture is full excuse for all
his mean deeds.  Of this tribe is the man who cuts his name on all walls
and smears it on the pyramids, to proclaim himself a fool to the world;
the difference being that, instead of wanting to know anything, he wants
everybody to know that His Littleness was once in a great place.

I knew a distinguished artist, who, while in the East, only secured his
best sketch of a landscape by employing fifty men to keep off the
multitude.  I have seen a strange fellow take a lady's sketch out of her
hand, excusing himself with the remark that he was so fond of pictures.
Of course my readers do not act thus.  When they are passing through the
Louvre or British Museum they never pause and overlook artists, despite
the notices requesting them not to do so.  Of course not.  Yet I once
knew a charming young American lady, who scouted the idea as nonsense
that she should not watch artists at work.  "Why, we used to make up
parties for the purpose of looking at them!" she said.  "It was half the
fun of going there.  I'm sure the artists were delighted to get a chance
to talk to us."  Doubtless.  And yet there are really very few artists
who do not work more at their ease when not watched, and I have known
some to whom such watching was misery.  They are not, O intruder,
painting for _your_ amusement!

This is not such a far cry from my Romanys as it may seem.  When I think
of what I have lost in this life by impertinence coming between me and
gypsies, I feel that it could not be avoided.  The proportion of men,
even of gentlemen, or of those who dress decently, who cannot see another
well-dressed man talking with a very poor one in public, without at once
surmising a mystery, and endeavoring to solve it, is amazing.  And they
do not stop at a trifle, either.

It is a marked characteristic of all gypsies that they are quite free
from any such mean intrusiveness.  Whether it is because they themselves
are continually treated as curiosities, or because great knowledge of
life in a small way has made them philosophers, I will not say, but it is
a fact that in this respect they are invariably the politest people in
the world.  Perhaps their calm contempt of the _galerly_, or green
Gorgios, is founded on a consciousness of their superiority in this
matter.

The Hungarian gypsy differs from all his brethren of Europe in being more
intensely gypsy.  He has deeper, wilder, and more original feeling in
music, and he is more inspired with a love of travel.  Numbers of
Hungarian Romany chals--in which I include all Austrian gypsies--travel
annually all over Europe, but return as regularly to their own country.
I have met with them exhibiting bears in Baden-Baden.  These Ricinari, or
bear-leaders, form, however, a set within a set, and are in fact more
nearly allied to the gypsy bear-leaders of Turkey and Syria than to any
other of their own people.  They are wild and rude to a proverb, and
generally speak a peculiar dialect of Romany, which is called the
Bear-leaders' by philologists.  I have also seen Syrian-gypsy Ricinari in
Cairo.  Many of the better caste make a great deal of money, and some are
rich.  Like all really pure-blooded gypsies, they have deep feelings,
which are easily awakened by kindness, but especially by sympathy and
interest.




ENGLISH GYPSIES.


I.  OATLANDS PARK.


Oatlands Park (between Weybridge and Walton-upon-Thames) was once the
property of the Duke of York, but now the lordly manor-house is a hotel.
The grounds about it are well preserved and very picturesque.  They
should look well, for they cover a vast and wasted fortune.  There is,
for instance, a grotto which cost forty thousand pounds.  It is one of
those wretched and tasteless masses of silly rock-rococo work which were
so much admired at the beginning of the present century, when sham ruins
and sham caverns were preferred to real.  There is, also, close by the
grotto, a dogs' burial-ground, in which more than a hundred animals, the
favorites of the late duchess, lie buried.  Over each is a tombstone,
inscribed with a rhyming epitaph, written by the titled lady herself, and
which is in sober sadness in every instance doggerel, as befits the
subject.  In order to degrade the associations of religion and church
rites as effectually as possible, there is attached to these graves the
semblance of a ruined chapel, the stained-glass window of which was taken
from a church. {97}  I confess that I could never see either grotto or
grave-yard without sincerely wishing, out of regard to the memory of both
duke and duchess, that these ridiculous relics of vulgar taste and
affected sentimentalism could be completely obliterated.  But, apart from
them, the scenes around are very beautiful; for there are grassy slopes
and pleasant lawns, ancient trees and broad gravel walks, over which, as
the dry leaves fall on the crisp sunny morning, the feet are tempted to
walk on and on, all through the merry golden autumn day.

The neighborhood abounds in memories of olden time.  Near Oatlands is a
modernized house, in which Henry the Eighth lived in his youth.  It
belonged then to Cardinal Wolsey; now it is owned by Mr. Lindsay,--a
sufficient cause for wits calling it Lindsay-Wolsey, that being also a
"fabric."  Within an hour's walk is the palace built by Cardinal Wolsey,
while over the river, and visible from the portico, is the little old
Gothic church of Shepperton, and in the same view, to the right, is the
old Walton Bridge, by Cowie Stakes, supposed to cover the exact spot
where Caesar crossed.  This has been denied by many, but I know that the
field adjacent to it abounds in ancient British jars filled with burned
bones, the relics of an ancient battle,--probably that which legend
states was fought on the neighboring Battle Island.  Stout-hearted Queen
Bessy has also left her mark on this neighborhood, for within a mile is
the old Saxon-towered church of Walton, in which the royal dame was asked
for her opinion of the sacrament when it was given to her, to which she
replied:--

    "Christ was the Word who spake it,
    He took the bread and brake it;
    And what that Word did make it,
    That I believe, and take it."

In memory of this the lines were inscribed on the massy Norman pillar by
which she stood.  From the style and cutting it is evident that the
inscription dates from the reign of Elizabeth.  And very near Oatlands,
in fact on the grounds, there are two ancient yew-trees, several hundred
yards apart.  The story runs that Queen Elizabeth once drew a long bow
and shot an arrow so far that, to commemorate the deed, one of these
trees was planted where she stood, and the other where the shaft fell.
All England is a museum of touching or quaint relics; to me one of its
most interesting cabinets is this of the neighborhood of Weybridge and
Walton-upon-Thames.

I once lived for eight months at Oatlands Park, and learned to know the
neighborhood well.  I had many friends among the families in the
vicinity, and, guided by their advice, wandered to every old church and
manor-house, ruin and haunted rock, fairy-oak, tower, palace, or shrine
within a day's ramble.  But there was one afternoon walk of four miles,
round by the river, which I seldom missed.  It led by a spot on the bank,
and an old willow-tree near the bridge, which spot was greatly haunted by
the Romany, so that, excepting during the hopping-season of autumn, when
they were away in Kent, I seldom failed to see from afar a light rising
smoke, and near it a tent and a van, as the evening shadows blended with
the mist from the river in phantom union.

It is a common part of gypsy life that the father shall be away all day,
lounging about the next village, possibly in the _kitchema_ or ale-house,
or trying to trade a horse, while the wife trudges over the country, from
one farm-house or cottage to another, loaded with baskets, household
utensils, toys, or cheap ornaments, which she endeavors, like a true
Autolyca, with wily arts and wheedling tones, to sell to the rustics.
When it can be managed, this hawking is often an introduction to
fortune-telling, and if these fail the gypsy has recourse to begging.
But it is a weary life, and the poor _dye_ is always glad enough to get
home.  During the day the children have been left to look out for
themselves or to the care of the eldest, and have tumbled about the van,
rolled around with the dog, and fought or frolicked as they chose.  But
though their parents often have a stock of cheap toys, especially of
penny dolls and the like, which they put up as prizes for games at races
and fairs, I have never seen these children with playthings.  The little
girls have no dolls; the boys, indeed, affect whips, as becomes incipient
jockeys, but on the whole they never seemed to me to have the same ideas
as to play as ordinary house-children.  The author of "My Indian Garden"
has made the same observation of Hindoo little ones, whose ways are not
as our ways were when we were young.  Roman and Egyptian children had
their dolls; and there is something sadly sweet to me in the sight of
these barbarous and naive facsimiles of miniature humanity, which come up
like little spectres out of the dust of ancient days.  They are so rude
and queer, these Roman puppets; and yet they were loved once, and had pet
names, and their owl-like faces were as tenderly kissed as their little
mistresses had been by their mothers.  So the Romany girl, unlike the
Roman, is generally doll-less and toy-less.  But the affection between
mother and child is as warm among these wanderers as with any other
people; and it is a touching sight to see the gypsy who has been absent
all the weary day returning home.  And when she is seen from afar off
there is a race among all the little dark-brown things to run to mother
and get kissed, and cluster and scramble around her, and perhaps receive
some little gift which mother's thoughtful love has provided.  Knowing
these customs, I was wont to fill my pockets with chestnuts or oranges,
and, distributing them among the little ones, talk with them, and await
the sunset return of their parents.  The confidence or love of all
children is delightful; but that of gypsy children resembles the
friendship of young foxes, and the study of their artless-artful ways is
indeed attractive.  I can remember that one afternoon six small Romany
boys implored me to give them each a penny.  I replied,--

"If I had sixpence, how would you divide it?"

"That would be a penny apiece," said the eldest boy.

"And if threepence?"

"A ha'penny apiece."

"And three ha'pence?"

"A farden all round.  And then it couldn't go no furder, unless we bought
tobacco an' diwided it."

"Well, I have some tobacco.  But can any of you smoke?"

They were from four to ten years of age, and at the word every one pulled
out the stump of a blackened pipe,--such depraved-looking fragments I
never saw,--and holding them all up, and crowding closely around, like
hungry poultry with uplifted bills, they began to clamor for _tuvalo_, or
tobacco.  They were connoisseurs, too, and the elder boy, as he secured
his share, smelled it with intense satisfaction, and said, "That's _rye's
tuvalo_;" that is, "gentleman's tobacco," or best quality.

One evening, as the shadows were darkening the day, I met a little gypsy
boy, dragging along, with incredible labor, a sack full of wood, which
one needed not go far afield to surmise was neither purchased nor begged.
The alarmed and guilty or despairing look which he cast at me was very
touching.  Perhaps he thought I was the gentleman upon whose property he
had "found" the wood; or else a magistrate.  How he stared when I spoke
to him in Romany, and offered to help him carry it!  As we bore it along
I suggested that we had better be careful and avoid the police, which
remark established perfect confidence between us.  But as we came to the
tent, what was the amazement of the boy's mother to see him returning
with a gentleman helping him to carry his load!  And to hear me say in
Romany, and in a cheerful tone, "Mother, here is some wood we've been
stealing for you."

Gypsies have strong nerves and much cheek, but this was beyond her
endowment; she was appalled at the unearthly strangeness of the whole
proceeding, and when she spoke there was a skeleton rattle in her words
and a quaver of startled ghastliness in her laugh.  She had been alarmed
for her boy, and when I appeared she thought I was a swell bringing him
in under arrest; but when I announced myself in Romany as an accomplice,
emotion stifled thought.  And I lingered not, and spoke no more, but
walked away into the woods and the darkness.  However, the legend went
forth on the roads, even unto Kingston, and was told among the rollicking
Romanys of 'Appy Ampton; for there are always a merry, loafing lot of
them about that festive spot, looking out for excursionists through the
months when the gorse blooms, and kissing is in season--which is always.
And he who seeks them on Sunday may find them camped in Green Lane.

When I wished for a long ramble on the hedge-lined roads--the sweet roads
of old England--and by the green fields, I was wont to take a day's walk
to Netley Abbey.  Then I could pause, as I went, before many a quiet,
sheltered spot, adorned with arbors and green alleys, and protected by
trees and hawthorn hedges, and again surrender my soul, while walking, to
tender and vague reveries, in which all definite thoughts swim
overpowered, yet happy, in a sea of voluptuous emotions inspired by
clouds lost in the blue sea of heaven and valleys visioned away into the
purple sky.  What opium is to one, what hasheesh may be to another, what
_kheyf_ or mere repose concentrated into actuality is to the Arab, that
is Nature to him who has followed her for long years through poets and
mystics and in works of art, until at last he pierces through dreams and
pictures to reality.

The ruins of Netley Abbey, nine or ten miles from Oatlands Park, are
picturesque and lonely, and well fitted for the dream-artist in shadows
among sunshine.  The priory was called Newstead or De Novo Loco in Norman
times, when it was founded by Ruald de Calva, in the day of Richard Coeur
de Lion.  The ruins rise gray, white, and undressed with ivy, that they
may contrast the more vividly with the deep emerald of the meadows
around.  "The surrounding scenery is composed of rivers and
rivulets,"--for seven streams run by it, according to Aubrey,--"of
foot-bridge and fords, plashy pools and fringed, tangled hollows, trees
in groups or alone, and cattle dotted over the pastures:" an English Cuyp
from many points of view, beautiful and English-home-like from all.  Very
near it is the quaint, out-of-the-way, darling little old church of
Pirford, up a hill, nestling among trees, a half-Norman, decorated
beauty, out of the age, but altogether in the heart.  As I came near, of
a summer afternoon, the waving of leaves and the buzzing of bees without,
and the hum of the voices of children at school within the adjoining
building, the cool shade and the beautiful view of the ruined Abbey
beyond, made an impression which I can never forget.  Among such scenes
one learns why the English love so heartily their rural life, and why
every object peculiar to it has brought forth a picture or a poem.  I can
imagine how many a man, who has never known what poetry was at home, has
wept with yearning inexpressible, when sitting among burning sands and
under the palms of the East, for such scenes as these.

But Netley Abbey is close by the river Wey, and the sight of that river
and the thought of the story of the monks of the olden time who dwelt in
the Abbey drive away sentiment as suddenly as a north wind scatters
sea-fogs.  For the legend is a merry one, and the reader may have heard
it; but if he has not I will give it in one of the merriest ballads ever
written.  By whom I know not,--doubtless many know.  I sing, while
walking, songs of olden time.


THE MONKS OF THE WEY.


A TRUE AND IMPORTANT RELATION OF THE WONDERFUL TUNNELL OF NEWARKE ABBEY
AND OF THE UNTIMELY ENDE OF SEVERALL OF YE GHOSTLY BRETH'REN.

    The monks of the Wey seldom sung any psalms,
    And little they thought of religion or qualms;
    Such rollicking, frolicking, ranting, and gay,
    And jolly old boys were the monks of the Wey.

    To the sweet nuns of Ockham devoting their cares,
    They had little time for their beads and their prayers;
    For the love of these maidens they sighed night and day,
    And neglected devotion, these monks of the Wey.

    And happy i' faith might these brothers have been
    If the river had never been rolling between
    The abbey so grand and the convent so gray,
    That stood on the opposite side of the Wey.

    For daily they sighed, and then nightly they pined
    But little to anchorite precepts inclined,
    So smitten with beauty's enchantments were they,
    These rollicking, frolicking monks of the Wey.

    But scandal was rife in the country near,
    They dared not row over the river for fear;
    And no more could they swim it, so fat were they,
    These oily and amorous monks of the Wey.

    Loudly they groaned for their fate so hard,
    From the love of these beautiful maidens debarred,
    Till a brother just hit on a plan which would stay
    The woe of these heart-broken monks of the Wey.

    "Nothing," quoth he, "should true love sunder;
    Since we cannot go over, then let us go under!
    Boats and bridges shall yield to clay,
    We'll dig a long tunnel clean under the Wey."

    So to it they went with right good will,
    With spade and shovel and pike and bill;
    And from evening's close till the dawn of day
    They worked like miners all under the Wey.

    And at vesper hour, as their work begun,
    Each sung of the charms of his favorite nun;
    "How surprised they will be, and how happy!" said they,
    "When we pop in upon them from under the Wey!"

    And for months they kept grubbing and making no sound
    Like other black moles, darkly under the ground;
    And no one suspected such going astray,
    So sly were these mischievous monks of the Wey.

    At last their fine work was brought near to a close
    And early one morn from their pallets they rose,
    And met in their tunnel with lights to survey
    If they'd scooped a free passage right under the Wey.

    But alas for their fate!  As they smirked and they smiled.
    To think how completely the world was beguiled,
    The river broke in, and it grieves me to say
    It drowned all the frolicksome monks of the Wey.

                                  * * * * *

    O churchmen beware of the lures of the flesh,
    The net of the devil has many a mesh!
    And remember whenever you're tempted to stray,
    The fate that befell the poor monks of the Wey.

It was all long ago, and now there are neither monks nor nuns; the
convent has been converted, little by little, age by age, into cottages,
even as the friars and nuns themselves may have been organically changed
possibly into violets, but more probably into the festive sparrows which
flit and hop and flirt about the ruins with abrupt startles, like
pheasants sudden bursting on the wing.  There is a pretty little Latin
epigram, written by a gay monk, of a pretty little lady, who, being very
amorous, and observing that sparrows were like her as to love, hoped that
she might be turned into one after death; and it is not difficult for a
dreamer in an old abbey, of a golden day to fancy that these merry, saucy
birdies, who dart and dip in and out of the sunshine or shadow, chirping
their shameless ditties _pro et con_, were once the human dwellers in the
spot, who sang their gaudrioles to pleasant strains.

I became familiar with many such scenes for many miles about Oatlands,
not merely during solitary walks, but by availing myself of the kind
invitations of many friends, and by hunting afoot with the beagles.  In
this fashion one has hare and hound, but no horse.  It is not needed, for
while going over crisp stubble and velvet turf, climbing fences and
jumping ditches, a man has a keen sense of being his own horse, and when
he accomplishes a good leap of being intrinsically well worth 200 pounds.
And indeed, so long as anybody can walk day in and out a greater distance
than would tire a horse, he may well believe he is really worth one.  It
may be a good thing for us to reflect on the fact that if slavery
prevailed at the present day as it did among the polished Greeks the
average price of young gentlemen, and even of young ladies, would not be
more than what is paid for a good hunter.  Divested of diamonds and of
Worth's dresses, what would a girl of average charms be worth to a
stranger?  Let us reflect!

It was an October morning, and, pausing after a run, I let the pack and
the "course-men" sweep away, while I sat in a pleasant spot to enjoy the
air and scenery.  The solemn grandeur of groves and the quiet dignity of
woodland glades, barred with rays of solid-seeming sunshine, such as the
saint of old hung his cloak on, the brook into which the overhanging
chestnuts drop, as if in sport, their creamy golden little boats of
leaves, never seem so beautiful or impressive as immediately after a rush
and cry of many men, succeeded by solitude and silence.  Little by little
the bay of the hounds, the shouts of the hunters, and the occasional
sound of the horn grew fainter; the birds once more appeared, and sent
forth short calls to their timid friends.  I began again to notice who my
neighbors were, as to daisies and heather which resided around the stone
on which I sat, and the exclusive circle of a fairy-ring at a little
distance, which, like many exclusive circles, consisted entirely of
mushrooms.

As the beagle-sound died away, and while the hounds were "working around"
to the road, I heard footsteps approaching, and looking up saw before me
a gypsy woman and a boy.  She was a very gypsy woman, an ideal witch,
nut-brown, tangle-haired, aquiline of nose, and fierce-eyed; and fiercely
did she beg!  As amid broken Gothic ruins, overhung with unkempt ivy, one
can trace a vanished and strange beauty, so in this worn face of the
Romany, mantled by neglected tresses, I could see the remains of what
must have been once a wonderful though wild loveliness.  As I looked into
those serpent eyes; trained for a long life to fascinate in
fortune-telling simple dove-girls, I could readily understand the
implicit faith with which many writers in the olden time spoke of the
"fascination" peculiar to female glances.  "The multiplication of women,"
said the rabbis, "is the increase of witches," for the belles in Israel
were killing girls, with arrows, the bows whereof are formed by pairs of
jet-black eyebrows joined in one.  And thus it was that these black-eyed
beauties, by _mashing_ {108} men for many generations, with shafts shot
sideways and most wantonly, at last sealed their souls into the corner of
their eyes, as you have heard before.  Cotton Mather tells us that these
witches with peaked eye-corners could never weep but three tears out of
their long-tailed eyes.  And I have observed that such tears, as they
sweep down the cheeks of the brunette witches, are also long-tailed, and
recall by their shape and glitter the eyes from which they fell, even as
the daughter recalls the mother.  For all love's witchcraft lurks in
flashing eyes,--_lontan del occhio lontan dal' cuor_.

It is a great pity that the pigeon-eye-peaks, so pretty in young witches,
become in the old ones crow's-feet and crafty.  When I greeted the woman,
she answered in Romany, and said she was a Stanley from the North.  She
lied bravely, and I told her so.  It made no difference in any way, nor
was she hurt.  The brown boy, who seemed like a goblin, umber-colored
fungus, growing by a snaky black wild vine, sat by her and stared at me.
I was pleased, when he said _tober_, that she corrected him, exclaiming
earnestly, "Never say _tober_ for road; that is _canting_.  Always say
_drom_; that is good Romanes."  There is always a way of bringing up a
child in the way he should go,--though it be a gypsy one,--and _drom_
comes from the Greek _dromos_, which is elegant and classical.  Then she
began to beg again, to pass the time, and I lectured her severely on the
sin and meanness of her conduct, and said, with bitterness, "Do dogs eat
dogs, or are all the Gorgios dead in the land, that you cry for money to
me?  Oh, you are a fine Stanley! a nice Beshaley you, to sing mumpin and
mongerin, when a half-blood Matthews has too much decency to trouble the
rye!  And how much will you take?  Whatever the gentleman pleases, and
thank you, my kind sir, and the blessings of the poor gypsy woman on you.
Yes, I know that, _givelli_, you mother of all the liars.  You expect a
sixpence, and here it is, and may you get drunk on the money, and be well
thrashed by your man for it.  And now see what I had in my hand all the
time to give you.  A lucky half crown, my deary; but that's not for you
now.  I only give a sixpence to a beggar, but I stand a _pash-korauna_ to
any Romany who's a pal and amal."

This pleasing discourse made us very good friends, and, as I kept my eyes
sharply fixed on her viper orbs with an air of intense suspicion,
everything like ill-feeling or distrust naturally vanished from her mind;
for it is of the nature of the Romanys and all their kind to like those
whom they respect, and respect those whom they cannot deceive, and to
measure mankind exactly by their capacity of being taken in, especially
by themselves.  As is also the case, in good society, with many ladies
and some gentlemen,--and much good may it do them!

There was a brief silence, during which the boy still looked wistfully
into my face, as if wondering what kind of gentleman I might be, until
his mother said,--

"How do you do with them _ryas_ [swells]?  What do you tell
'em--about--what do they think--you know?"

This was not explicit, but I understood it perfectly.  There is a great
deal of such loose, disjointed conversation among gypsies and other
half-thinkers.  An educated man requires, or pretends to himself to
require, a most accurately-detailed and form-polished statement of
anything to understand it.  The gypsy is less exacting.  I have observed
among rural Americans much of this lottery style of conversation, in
which one man invests in a dubious question, not knowing exactly what
sort of a prize or blank answer he may draw.  What the gypsy meant
effectively was, "How do you account to the Gorgios for knowing so much
about us, and talking with us?  Our life is as different from yours as
possible, and you never acquired such a knowledge of all our tricky ways
as you have just shown without much experience of us and a double life.
You are related to us in some way, and you deceive the Gorgios about it.
What is your little game of life, on general principles?"

For the gypsy is so little accustomed to having any congenial interest
taken in him that he can clearly explain it only by consanguinity.  And
as I was questioned, so I answered,--

"Well, I tell them I like to learn languages, and am trying to learn
yours; and then I'm a foreigner in the country, anyhow, and they don't
know my _droms_ [ways], and they don't care much what I do,--don't you
see?"

This was perfectly satisfactory, and as the hounds came sweeping round
the corner of the wood she rose and went her way, and I saw her growing
less and less along the winding road and up the hill, till she
disappeared, with her boy, in a small ale-house.  "Bang went the
sixpence."

When the last red light was in the west I went down to the river, and as
I paused, and looked alternately at the stars reflected and flickering in
the water and at the lights in the little gypsy camp, I thought that as
the dancing, restless, and broken sparkles were to their serene types
above, such were the wandering and wild Romany to the men of culture in
their settled homes.  It is from the house-dweller that the men of the
roads and commons draw the elements of their life, but in that life they
are as shaken and confused as the starlight in the rippling river.  But
if we look through our own life we find that it is not the gypsy alone
who is merely a reflection and an imitation of the stars above him, and a
creature of second-hand fashion.

I found in the camp an old acquaintance, named Brown, and also perceived
at the first greeting that the woman Stanley had told Mrs. Brown that I
would not be _mongerdo_, or begged from, and that the latter, proud of
her power in extortion, and as yet invincible in mendicancy, had boasted
that she would succeed, let others weakly fail.  And to lose no time she
went at me with an abruptness and dramatic earnestness which promptly
betrayed the secret.  And on the spot I made a vow that nothing should
get a farthing from me, though I should be drawn by wild horses.  And a
horse was, indeed, brought into requisition to draw me, or my money, but
without success; for Mr. Brown, as I very well knew,--it being just then
the current topic in the best society on the road,--had very recently
been involved in a tangled trouble with a stolen horse.  This horse had
been figuratively laid at his door, even as a "love-babe" is sometimes
placed on the front steps of a virtuous and grave citizen,--at least,
this is what White George averred,--and his very innocence and purity
had, like a shining mark, attracted the shafts of the wicked.  He had
come out unscathed, with a package of papers from a lawyer, which
established his character above par; but all this had cost money,
beautiful golden money, and brought him to the very brink of ruin!  Mrs.
Brown's attack was a desperate and determined effort, and there was more
at stake on its success than the reader may surmise.  Among gypsy women
skill in begging implies the possession of every talent which they most
esteem, such as artfulness, cool effrontery, and the power of moving pity
or provoking generosity by pique or humor.  A quaint and racy book might
be written, should it only set forth the manner in which the experienced
matrons give straight-tips or suggestions to the maidens as to the manner
and lore of begging; and it is something worth hearing when several sit
together and devise dodges, and tell anecdotes illustrating the noble art
of mendicity, and how it should be properly practiced.

Mrs. Brown knew that to extort alms from me would place her on the
pinnacle as an artist.  Among all the Cooper clan, to which she was
allied, there was not one who ever begged from me, they having all found
that the ripest nuts are those which fall from the tree of their own
accord, or are blown earthward by the soft breezes of benevolence, and
not those which are violently beaten down.  She began by pitiful appeals;
she was moving, but I did not budge.  She grew pathetic; she touched on
the stolen horse; she paused, and gushed almost to tears, as much as to
say, If it must be, you _shall_ know all.  Ruin stared them in the face;
poverty was crushing them.  It was well acted,--rather in the Bernhardt
style, which, if M. Ondit speaks the truth, is also employed rather
extensively for acquiring "de monish."  I looked at the van, of which the
Browns are proud, and inquired if it were true that it had been insured
for a hundred pounds, as George had recently boasted.  Persuasion having
failed, Mrs. Brown tried bold defiance, saying that they needed no
company who were no good to them, and plainly said to me I might be gone.
It was her last card, thinking that a threat to dissolve our acquaintance
would drive me to capitulate, and it failed.  I laughed, went into the
van, sat down, took out my brandy flask, and then accepted some bread and
ale, and, to please them, read aloud all the papers acquitting George
from all guilt as concerned the stolen horse,--papers which, he declared,
had cost him full five pounds.  This was a sad come-down from the story
first told.  Then I seriously rated his wife for begging from me.  "You
know well enough," I said, "that I give all I can spare to your family
and your people when they are sick or poor.  And here you are, the
richest Romanys on the road between Windsor and the Boro Gav, begging a
friend, who knows all about you, for money!  Now, here is a shilling.
Take it.  Have half a crown?  Two of 'em!  No!  Oh, you don't want it
here in your own house.  Well, you have some decency left, and to save
your credit I won't make you take it.  And you scandalize me, a gentleman
and a friend, just to show this tramp of a Stanley _juva_, who hasn't
even got a drag [wagon], that you can beat her _a mongerin mandy_
[begging me]."

Mrs. Brown assented volubly to everything, and all the time I saw in her
smiling eyes, ever agreeing to all, and heard from her voluble lips
nothing but the _lie_,--that lie which is the mental action and inmost
grain of the Romany, and especially of the _diddikai_, or half-breed.
Anything and everything--trickery, wheedling or bullying, fawning or
threatening, smiles, or rage, or tears--for a sixpence.  All day long
flattering and tricking to tell fortunes or sell trifles, and all life
one greasy lie, with ready frowns or smiles: as it was in India in the
beginning, as it is in Europe, and as it will be in America, so long as
there shall be a rambler on the roads, amen!

Sweet peace again established, Mrs. Brown became herself once more, and
acted the hospitable hostess, exactly in the spirit and manner of any
woman who has "a home of her own," and a spark of decent feeling in her
heart.  Like many actors, she was a bad lot on the boards, but a very
nice person off them.  Here in her rolling home she was neither a beggar
nor poor, and she issued her orders grandly.  "Boil some tea for the
_rye_--cook some coffee for the _rye_--wait a few minutes, my darling
gentleman, and I'll brile you a steak--or here's a fish, if you'd like
it?"  But I declined everything except the corner of a loaf and some ale;
and all the time a little brown boy, with great black eyes, a perfect
Murillo model, sat condensed in wondrous narrow space by the fire, baking
small apples between the bars of the grate, and rolling up his orbs at me
as if wondering what could have brought me into such a circle,--even as
he had done that morning in the greenwood.

Now if the reader would know what the interior of a gypsy van, or "drag,"
or _wardo_, is like, he may see it in the following diagram.

                     [Picture: Interior of gypsy van]

_A_ is the door; _B_ is the bed, or rather two beds, each six feet long,
like berths, with a vacant space below; _C_ is a grate cooking-stove; _D_
is a table, which hangs by hinges from the wall; _E_ is a chest of
drawers; _f_ and _f_ are two chairs.  The general appearance of a
well-kept van is that of a state-room.  Brown's is a very good van, and
quite clean.  They are admirably well adapted for slow traveling, and it
was in such vans, purchased from gypsies, that Sir Samuel Baker and his
wife explored the whole of Cyprus.

Mrs. Brown was proud of her van and of her little treasures.  From the
great recess under the bed she raked out as a rare curiosity an old Dolly
Varden or damasked skirt, not at all worn, quite pretty, and evidently of
considerable value to a collector.  This had belonged to Mrs. Brown's
grandmother, an old gypsy queen.  And it may be observed, by the way,
that the claims of every Irishman of every degree to be descended from
one of the ancient kings of Ireland fade into nothing before those of the
gypsy women, all of whom, with rare exception, are the own daughters of
royal personages, granddaughterhood being hardly a claim to true
nobility.  Then the bed itself was exhibited with pride, and the princess
sang its praises, till she affirmed that the _rye_ himself did not sleep
on a better one, for which George reprimanded her.  But she vigorously
defended its excellence, and, to please her, I felt it and declared it
was indeed much softer than the one I slept on, which was really
true,--thank Heaven--and was received as a great compliment, and
afterwards proclaimed on the roads even unto the ends of Surrey.

"Yes," said Brown, as I observed some osiers in the cupboard, "when I
feels like it I sometimes makes a pound a day a-making baskets."

"I should think," I said, "that it would be cheaper to buy French baskets
of Bulrose [Bulureaux] in Houndsditch, ready made."

"So one would think; but the _ranyor_ [osiers] costs nothin', and so it's
all profit, any way."

Then I urged the greater profit of living in America, but both assured me
that so long as they could make a good living and be very comfortable, as
they considered themselves, in England, it would be nonsense to go to
America.

For all things are relative, and many a gypsy whom the begged-from pity
sincerely, is as proud and happy in a van as any lord in the land.  A
very nice, neat young gypsy woman, camped long before just where the
Browns were, once said to me, "It isn't having everything fine and
stylish that makes you happy.  Now we've got a van, and have everything
so elegant and comfortable, and sleep warm as anybody; and yet I often
say to my husband that we used to be happier when we used to sleep under
a hedge with, may be, only a thin blanket, and wake up covered with
snow."  Now this woman had only a wretched wagon, and was always tramping
in the rain, or cowering in a smoky, ragged tent and sitting on the
ground, but she had food, fire, and fun, with warm clothes, and believed
herself happy.  Truly, she had better reason to think so than any old
maid with a heart run to waste on church gossip, or the latest
engagements and marriages; for it is better to be a street-boy in a
corner with a crust than one who, without it, discusses, in starvation,
with his friend the sausages and turtle-soup in a cook-shop window,
between which and themselves there is a great pane of glass fixed, never
to be penetrated.



II.  WALKING AND VISITING.


I never shall forget the sparkling splendor of that frosty morning in
December when I went with a younger friend from Oatlands Park for a day's
walk.  I may have seen at other times, but I do not remember, such winter
lace-work as then adorned the hedges.  The gossamer spider has within her
an inward monitor which tells if the weather will be fine; but it says
nothing about sudden changes to keen cold, and the artistic result was
that the hedges were hung with thousands of Honiton lamp-mats, instead of
the thread fly-catchers which their little artists had intended.  And on
twigs and dead leaves, grass and rock and wall, were such expenditures of
Brussels and Spanish point, such a luxury of real old Venetian run mad,
and such deliria of Russian lace as made it evident that Mrs. Jack Frost
is a very extravagant fairy, but one gifted with exquisite taste.  When I
reflect how I have in my time spoken of the taste for lace and diamonds
in women as entirely without foundation in nature, I feel that I sinned
deeply.  For Nature, in this lace-work, displays at times a sympathy with
humanity,--especially womanity,--and coquets and flirts with it, as
becomes the subject, in a manner which is merrily awful.  There was once
in Philadelphia a shop the windows of which were always filled with
different kinds of the richest and rarest lace, and one cold morning I
found that the fairies had covered the panes with literal frost
fac-similes of the exquisite wares which hung behind.  This was no fancy;
the copies were as accurate as photographs.  Can it be that in the
invisible world there are Female Fairy Schools of Design, whose scholars
combine in this graceful style Etching on Glass and Art Needlework?

We were going to the village of Hersham to make a call.  It was not at
any stylish villa or lordly manor-house,--though I knew of more than one
in the vicinity where we would have been welcome,--but at a rather
disreputable-looking edifice, which bore on its front the sign of
"Lodgings for Travellers."  Now "traveller" means, below a certain circle
of English life, not the occasional, but the habitual wanderer, or one
who dwells upon the roads, and gains his living thereon.  I have in my
possession several cards of such a house.  I found them wrapped in a
piece of paper, by a deserted gypsy camp, where they had been lost:--

                               A NEW HOUSE.

     _Good Lodging for Travellers_.  _With a Large Private Kitchen_.

                             THE CROSS KEYS,
                      WEST STREET . . . MAIDENHEAD.

                              BY J. HARRIS.

The "private kitchen" indicates that the guests will have facilities for
doing their own cooking, as all of them bring their own victuals in
perpetual picnic.  In the inclosure of the house in Hersham, the tops of
two or three gypsy vans could always be seen above the high fence, and
there was that general air of mystery about the entire establishment
which is characteristic of all places haunted by people whose ways are
not as our ways, and whose little games are not as our little games.  I
had become acquainted with it and its proprietor, Mr. Hamilton, in that
irregular and only way which is usual with such acquaintances.  I was
walking by the house one summer day, and stopped to ask my way.  A
handsome dark-brown girl was busy at the wash-tub, two or three older
women were clustered at the gate, and in all their faces was the manner
of the _diddikai_ or _chureni_, or half-blood gypsy.  As I spoke I
dropped my voice, and said, inquiringly,--

"Romanes?"

"Yes," was the confidential answer.

They were all astonished, and kept quiet till I had gone a few rods on my
way, when the whole party, recovering from their amazement, raised a
gentle cheer, expressive of approbation and sympathy.  A few days after,
walking with a lady in Weybridge, she said to me,--

"Who is that man who looked at you so closely?"

"I do not know."

"That's very strange.  I am quite sure I heard him utter two words in a
strange language, as you passed, as if he only meant them for you.  They
sounded like _sarshaun baw_."  Which means, "How are you, sir?" or
friend.  As we came up the street, I saw the man talking with a
well-dressed, sporting-looking man, not quite a gentleman, who sat
cheekily in his own jaunty little wagon.  As I passed, the one of the
wagon said to the other, speaking of me, and in pure Romany, evidently
thinking I did not understand,--

"_Dikk'adovo Giorgio_, _adoi_!"  (Look at that Gorgio, there!)

Being a Romany rye, and not accustomed to be spoken of as a Gorgio, I
looked up at him, angrily, when he, seeing that I understood him, smiled,
and bowed politely in apology.  I laughed and passed on.  But I thought
it a little strange, for neither of the men had the slightest indication
of gypsiness.  I met the one who had said _sarishan ba_ again, soon
after.  I found that he and the one of the wagon were not of gypsy blood,
but of a class not uncommon in England, who, be they rich or poor, are
affected towards gypsies.  The wealthy one lived with a gypsy mistress;
the poorer one had a gypsy wife, and was very fond of the language.
There is a very large class of these mysterious men everywhere about the
country.  They haunt fairs; they pop up unexpectedly as Jack-in-boxes in
unsuspected guise; they look out from under fatherly umbrellas; their
name is Legion; their mother is Mystery, and their uncle is Old Tom,--not
of Virginia, but of Gin.  Once, in the old town of Canterbury, I stood in
the street, under the Old Woman with the Clock, one of the quaintest
pieces of drollery ever imagined during the Middle Ages.  And by me was a
tinker, and as his wheel went _siz-'z-'z-'z_, _uz-uz-uz-z-z_! I talked
with him, and there joined us a fat, little, elderly, spectacled,
shabby-genteel, but well-to-do-looking sort of a punchy, small tradesman.
And, as we spoke, there went by a great, stout, roaring Romany woman,--a
scarlet-runner of Babylon run to seed,--with a boy and a hand-cart to
carry the seed in.  And to her I cried, "_Hav akai te mandy'll del tute a
shaori_!"  (Come here, and I'll stand a sixpence!)  But she did not
believe in my offer, but went her way, like a Burning Shame, through the
crowd, and was lost evermore.  I looked at the little old gentleman to
see what effect my outcry in a strange language had upon him.  But he
only remarked, soberly, "Well, now, I _should_ 'a' thought a sixpence
would 'a' brought her to!"  And the wheel said, "Suz-zuz-zuz-z-z I should
'a' suz-suz 'a' thought a suz-z-zixpence would 'a' suz-zuz 'a' brought
her, too-z-z-z!"  And I looked at the Old Woman with the Clock, and she
ticked,
"A--six--pence--would--have--brought--_me_--two--three--four"--and I
began to dream that all Canterbury was Romany.

We came to the house, the landlord was up-stairs, ill in bed, but would
be glad to see us; and he welcomed us warmly, and went deeply into Romany
family matters with my friend, the Oxford scholar.  Meanwhile, his
daughter, a nice brunette, received and read a letter; and he tried to
explain to me the mystery of the many men who are not gypsies, yet speak
Romany, but could not do it, though he was one of them.  It appeared from
his account that they were "a kind of mixed, you see, and dusted in, you
know, and on it, out of the family, it peppers up; but not exactly, you
understand, and that's the way it is.  And I remember a case in point,
and that was one day, and I had sold a horse, and was with my boy in a
_moramengro's buddika_ [barber's shop], and my boy says to me, in
Romanes, 'Father, I'd like to have my hair cut.'  'It's too dear here, my
son,' said I, Romaneskes; 'for the bill says threepence.'  And then the
barber, he ups and says, in Romany, 'Since you're Romanys, I'll cut it
for _two_pence, though it's clear out of all my rules.'  And he did it;
but why that man _rakkered Romanes_ I don't know, nor how it comes about;
for he hadn't no more call to it than a pig has to be a preacher.  But
I've known men in Sussex to take to diggin' truffles on the same
principles, and one Gorgio in Hastings that adopted sellin' fried fish
for his livin', about the town, because he thought it was kind of
romantic.  That's it."

Over the chimney-piece hung a large engraving of Milton and his
daughters.  It was out of place, and our host knew it, and was proud.  He
said he had bought it at an auction, and that it was a picture of
Middleton,--a poet, he believed; "anyhow, he was a writing man."  But, on
second thought, he remembered that the name was not Middleton, but
Millerton.  And on further reflection, he was still more convinced that
Millerton _was_ a poet.

I once asked old Matthew Cooper the Romany word for a poet.  And he
promptly replied that he had generally heard such a man called a
_givellengero_ or _gilliengro_, which means a song-master, but that he
himself regarded _shereskero-mush_, or head-man, as more elegant and
deeper; for poets make songs out of their heads, and are also ahead of
all other men in head-work.  There is a touching and unconscious tribute
to the art of arts in this definition which is worth recording.  It has
been said that, as people grow polite, they cease to be poetical; it is
certain that in the first circles they do not speak of their poets with
such respect as this.

Out again into the fresh air and the frost on the crisp, crackling road
and in the sunshine.  At such a time, when cold inspires life, one can
understand why the old poets and mystics believed that there was fire in
ice.  Therefore, Saint Sebaldus, coming into the hut of a poor and pious
man who was dying of cold, went out, and, bringing in an armful of
icicles, laid them on the andirons and made a good fire.  Now this fire
was the inner glowing glory of God, and worked both ways,--of course you
see the connection,--as was shown in Adelheid von Sigolsheim, the Holy
Nun of Unterlinden, who was so full of it that she passed the night in a
freezing stream, and then stood all the morning, ice-clad, in the choir,
and never caught cold.  And the pious Peroneta, to avoid a sinful suitor,
lived all winter, up to her neck, in ice-water, on the highest Alp in
Savoy. {125}  These were saints.  But there was a gypsy, named Dighton,
encamped near Brighton, who told me nearly the same story of another
gypsy, who was no saint, and which I repeat merely to show how extremes
meet.  It was that this gypsy, who was inspired with anything but the
inner glowing glory of God, but who was, on the contrary, cram full of
pure cussedness, being warmed by the same,--and the devil,--when chased
by the constable, took refuge in a river full of freezing slush and
broken ice, where he stood up to his neck and defied capture; for he
verily cared no more for it than did Saint Peter of Alcantara, who was
both ice and fire proof.  "Come out of that, my good man," said the
gentleman, whose hen he had stolen, "and I'll let you go."  "No, I won't
come out," said the gypsy.  "My blood be on your head!"  So the gentleman
offered him five pounds, and then a suit of clothes, to come ashore.  The
gypsy reflected, and at last said, "Well, if you'll add a drink of
spirits, I'll come; but it's only to oblige you that I budge."

Then we walked in the sober evening, with its gray gathering shadows, as
the last western rose light rippled in the river, yet fading in the
sky,--like a good man who, in dying, speaks cheerfully of earthly things,
while his soul is vanishing serenely into heaven.  The swans, looking
like snowballs, unconscious of cold were taking their last swim towards
the reedy, brake-tangled islets where they nested, gossiping as they
went.  The deepening darkness, at such a time, becomes more impressive
from the twinkling stars, just as the subduing silence is noted only by
the far-borne sounds from the hamlet or farm-house, or the occasional
whispers of the night-breeze.  So we went on in the twilight, along the
Thames, till we saw the night-fire of the Romanys and its gleam on the
_tan_.  A _tan_ is, strictly speaking, a tent, but a tent is a dwelling,
or stopping-place; and so from earliest Aryan time, the word _tan_ is
like Alabama, or "here we rest," and may be found in _tun_, the ancestor
of town, and in _stan_, as in Hindostan,--and if I blunder, so much the
better for the philological gentlemen, who, of all others, most delight
in setting erring brothers right, and never miss a chance to show,
through others' shame, how much they know.

There was a bark of a dog, and a voice said, "The Romany rye!"  They had
not seen us, but the dog knew, and they knew his language.

"_Sarishan ryor_!"

"_O boro duvel atch' pa leste_!"  (The great Lord be on you!)  This is
not a common Romany greeting.  It is of ancient days and archaic.  Sixty
or seventy years ago it was current.  Old Gentilla Cooper, the famous
fortune-teller of the Devil's Dike, near Brighton, knew it, and when she
heard it from me she was moved,--just as a very old negro in London was,
when I said to him, "_Sady_, uncle."  I said it because I had recognized
by the dog's bark that it was Sam Smith's tan.  Sam likes to be
considered as _deep_ Romany.  He tries to learn old gypsy words, and he
affects old gypsy ways.  He is pleased to be called Petulengro, which
means Smith.  Therefore, my greeting was a compliment.

In a few minutes we were in camp and at home.  We talked of many things,
and among others of witches.  It is remarkable that while the current
English idea of a witch is that of an old woman who has sold herself to
Satan, and is a distinctly marked character, just like Satan himself,
that of the witch among gypsies is general and Oriental.  There is no
Satan in India.  Mrs. Smith--since dead--held that witches were to be
found everywhere.  "You may know a natural witch," she said, "by certain
signs.  One of these is straight hair which curls at the ends.  Such
women have it in them."

It was only recently, as I write, that I was at a very elegant art
reception, which was fully reported in the newspapers.  And I was very
much astonished when a lady called my attention to another young and very
pretty lady, and expressed intense disgust at the way the latter wore her
hair.  It was simply parted in the middle, and fell down on either side,
smooth as a water-fall, and then broke into curls at the ends, just as
water, after falling, breaks into waves and rapids.  But as she spoke, I
felt it all, and saw that Mrs. Petulengro was in the right.  The girl
with the end-curled hair was uncanny.  Her hair curled at the ends,--so
did her eyes; she _was_ a witch.

"But there's a many witches as knows clever things," said Mrs.
Petulengro.  "And I learned from one of them how to cure the rheumatiz.
Suppose you've got the rheumatiz.  Well, just you carry a potato in your
pocket.  As the potato dries up, your rheumatiz will go away."

Sam Smith was always known on the roads as Fighting Sam.  Years have
passed, and when I have asked after him I have always heard that he was
either in prison or had just been let out.  Once it happened that, during
a fight with a Gorgio, the Gorgio's watch disappeared, and Sam was
arrested under suspicion of having got up the fight in order that the
watch might disappear.  All of his friends declared his innocence.  The
next trouble was for _chorin a gry_, or stealing a horse, and so was the
next, and so on.  As horse-stealing is not a crime, but only "rough
gambling," on the roads, nobody defended him on these counts.  He was, so
far as this went, only a sporting character.  When his wife died he
married Athalia, the widow of Joshua Cooper, a gypsy, of whom I shall
speak anon.  I always liked Sam.  Among the travelers, he was always
spoken of as genteel, owing to the fact, that whatever the state of his
wardrobe might be, he always wore about his neck an immaculate white
woolen scarf, and on _jours de fete_, such as horse-races, sported a
_boro stardi_, or chimney-pot hat.  O my friend, Colonel Dash, of the
club!  Change but the name, this fable is of thee!

"There's to be a _walgoro_, _kaliko i sala_--a fair to-morrow morning, at
Cobham," said Sam, as he departed.

"All right.  We'll be there."

As I went forth by the river into the night, and the stars looked down
like loving eyes, there shot a meteor across the sky, one long trail of
light, out of darkness into darkness, one instant bright, then dead
forever.  And I remembered how I once was told that stars, like mortals,
often fall in love.  O love, forever in thy glory go!  And that they send
their starry angels forth, and that the meteors are their messengers.  O
love, forever in thy glory go!  For love and light in heaven, as on
earth, were ever one, and planets speak with light.  Light is their
language; as they love they speak.  O love, forever in thy glory go!



III.  COBHAM FAIR.


The walk from Oatlands Park Hotel to Cobham is beautiful with memorials
of Older England.  Even on the grounds there is a quaint brick gateway,
which is the only relic of a palace which preceded the present pile.  The
grandfather was indeed a stately edifice, built by Henry VIII., improved
and magnified, according to his lights, by Inigo Jones, and then
destroyed during the civil war.  The river is here very beautiful, and
the view was once painted by Turner.  It abounds in "short windings and
reaches."  Here it is, indeed, the Olerifera Thamesis, as it was called
by Guillaume le Breton in his "Phillipeis," in the days of Richard the
Lion Heart.  Here the eyots and banks still recall Norman days, for they
are "wild and were;" and there is even yet a wary otter or two, known to
the gypsies and fishermen, w

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