There were the little rough porcelain figures of which the English peasantry are so fond, and which, cheap as they are, indicate that the taste of your friends Lady —–­ for Worcester “porcelain,” or the Duchess of —–­ for Majolica, has its roots among far humbler folk.  In fact there were perhaps twenty things which no English reader would have supposed were peculiar, yet which were something more than peculiar to me.  The master of the house was an Anglo-Saxon—­a Gorgio—­and his wife, by some magic or other, the oracle before-mentioned.

And I, answering said—­

“So you all call it patteran?” {24}

“No; very few of us know that name.  We do it without calling it anything.”

Then I took my stick and marked on the floor the following sign—­

[Sign:  ill24.jpg]

“There,” I said, “is the oldest patteran—­first of all—­which the Gipsies use to-day in foreign lands.  In Germany, when one band of Gipsies goes by a cross road, they draw that deep in the dust, with the end of the longest line pointing in the direction in which they have gone.  Then, the next who come by see the mark, and, if they choose, follow it.”

“We make it differently,” said the Gipsy.  “This is our sign—­the trin bongo drums, or cross.”  And he drew his patteran thus—­

[Cross:  ill25.jpg]

“The long end points the way,” he added; “just as in your sign.”

“You call a cross,” I remarked, “trin bongo drums, or the three crooked roads.  Do you know any such word as trushul for it?”

“No; trushilo is thirsty, and trushni means a faggot, and also a basket.”

“I shouldn’t wonder if a faggot once got the old Rommany word for cross,” I said, “because in it every stick is crossed by the wooden withy which binds it; and in a basket, every wooden strip crosses the other.”

I did not, however, think it worth while to explain to the Gipsies that when their ancestors, centuries ago, left India, it was with the memory that Shiva, the Destroyer, bore a trident, the tri-cula in Sanscrit, the trisul of Mahadeva in Hindustani, and that in coming to Europe the resemblance of its shape to that of the Cross impressed them, so that they gave to the Christian symbol the name of the sacred triple spear. {26} For if you turn up a little the two arms of a cross, you change the emblem of suffering and innocence at once into one of murder—­just as ever so little a deviation from goodness will lead you, my dear boy, into any amount of devilry.

And that the unfailing lucid flash of humour may not be wanting, there lightens on my mind the memory of The Mysterious Pitchfork—­a German satirical play which made a sensation in its time—­and Herlossohn in his romance of Der Letzte Taborit (which helped George Sand amazingly in Consuelo), makes a Gipsy chieftain appear in a wonderfully puzzling light by brandishing, in fierce midnight dignity, this agricultural parody on Neptune’s weapon, which brings me nicely around to my Gipsies again.