1.  That Rommany is the language of men at war with the law; therefore you are either a detective who has acquired it for no healthy purpose, or else you yourself are a scamp so high up in the profession that it behooves all the little fish of outlawdom to beware of you.

2.  Or else—­what is quite as much to be dreaded—­you are indeed a gentleman, but one seeking to make fun of him, and possibly able to do so.  At any rate, your knowledge of Rommany is a most alarming coin of vantage.  Certainly, reader, you know that a regular London streeter, say a cabman, would rather go to jail than be beaten in a chaffing match.  I nearly drove a hansom into sheer convulsions one night, about the time this chapter happened, by a very light puzzler indeed.  I had hesitated between him and another.

“You don’t know your own mind,” said the disappointed candidate to me.

“Mind your own business,” I replied.  It was a poor palindrome, {38} reader—­hardly worth telling—­yet it settled him.  But he swore—­oh, of course he did—­he swore beautifully.

Therefore, being moved to caution, I approached calmly and gazed earnestly on the revolving wheel.

“Do you know,” I said, “I think a great deal of your business, and take a great interest in it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I can tell you all the names of your tools in French.  You’d like to hear them, wouldn’t you?”

“Wery much indeed, sir.”

So I took up the chisel.  “This,” I said, “is a churi, sometimes called a chinomescro.”

“That’s the French for it, is it, sir?” replied the tinker, gravely.  Not a muscle of his face moved.

“The coals,” I added, “are hangars or wongurs, sometimes called kaulos.”

“Never heerd the words before in my life,” quoth the sedate tinker.

“The bellows is a pudemengro.  Some call it a pishota.”

“Wery fine language, sir, is French,” rejoined the tinker.  In every instance he repeated the words after me, and pronounced them correctly, which I had not invariably done.  “Wery fine language.  But it’s quite new to me.”

“You wouldn’t think now,” I said, affably, “that I had ever been on the roads!”

The tinker looked at me from my hat to my boots, and solemnly replied—­

“I should say it was wery likely.  From your language, sir, wery likely indeed.”

I gazed as gravely back as if I had not been at that instant the worst sold man in London, and asked—­

“Can you rakher Rommanis?” (i.e., speak Gipsy.)

And he said he could.

Then we conversed.  He spoke English intermingled with Gipsy, stopping from time to time to explain to his assistant, or to teach him a word.  This portly person appeared to be about as well up in the English Gipsy as myself—­that is, he knew it quite as imperfectly.  I learned that the master had been in America, and made New York and Brooklyn glad by his presence, while Philadelphia, my native city had been benefited as to its scissors and morals by him.