When a rather wild Gipsy once gives you a word, it must be promptly recorded, for a demand for its repetition at once confuses him. On doit saisir le mot echappe au Nomade, et ne pas l’obliger a le repeter, car il le changera selon so, facon, says Paspati.  Unused to abstract efforts of memory, all that he can retain is the sense of his last remark, and very often this is changed with the fleeting second by some associated thought, which materially modifies it.  It is always difficult, in consequence, to take down a story in the exact terms which a philologist desires.  There are two words for “bad” in English Gipsy, wafro and vessavo; and I think it must have taken me ten minutes one day to learn, from a by no means dull gipsy, whether the latter word was known to him, or if it were used at all.  He got himself into a hopeless tangle in trying to explain the difference between wafro and naflo, or ill, until his mind finally refused to act on vessavo at all, and spasmodically rejected it.  With all the patience of Job, and the meekness of Moses, I awaited my time, and finally obtained my information.

The impatience of such minds in narrative is amusing.  Let us suppose that I am asking some kushto Rommany chal for a version of AEsop’s fable of the youth and the cat.  He is sitting comfortably by the fire, and good ale has put him into a story-telling humour.  I begin—­

“Now then, tell me this adree Rommanis, in Gipsy—­Once upon a time there was a young man who had a cat.”

Gipsy.—­“Yeckorus—­’pre yeck cheirus—­a raklo lelled a matchka”—­

While I am writing this down, and long before it is half done, the professor of Rommany, becoming interested in the subject, continues volubly—­

—­“an’ the matchka yeck sala dicked a chillico apre a rukk—­(and the cat one morning saw a bird in a tree”—­)

I.—­“Stop, stop! Hatch a wongish!  That is not it!  Now go on. The young man loved this cat so much”—­

Gipsy (fluently, in Rommany), “that he thought her skin would make a nice pair of gloves”—­

“Confound your gloves!  Now do begin again”—­

Gipsy, with an air of grief and injury:  “I’m sure I was telling the story for you the best way I knew how!”

Yet this man was far from being a fool.  What was it, then?  Simply and solely, a lack of education—­of that mental training which even those who never entered a schoolhouse, receive more or less of, when they so much as wait patiently for a month behind a chair, or tug for six months at a plough, or in short, acquire the civilised virtue of Christian patience.  That is it.  We often hear in this world that a little education goes a great way; but to get some idea of the immense value of a very little education indeed, and the incredible effect it may have upon character, one should study with gentleness and patience a real Gipsy.