“And as I suppose you made money there, why didn’t you remain?” I inquired.

The Gipsy—­for he was really a Gipsy, and not a half-scrag—­looked at me wistfully, and apparently a little surprised that I should ask him such a question.

“Why, sir, you know that we can’t keep still.  Somethin’ kept telling me to move on, and keep a movin’.  Some day I’ll go back again.”

Suddenly—­I suppose because a doubt of my perfect Freemasonry had been aroused by my absurd question—­he said, holding up a kettle—­

“What do you call this here in Rommanis?”

“I call it a kekavi or a kavi,” I said.  “But it isn’t right Rommany.  It’s Greek, which the Rommanichals picked up on their way here.”

And here I would remark, by the way, that I have seldom spoken to a Gipsy in England who did not try me on the word for kettle.

“And what do you call a face?” he added.

“I call a face a mui,” I said, “and a nose a nak; and as for mui, I call rikker tiro mui, ‘hold your jaw.’  That is German Rommany.”

The tinker gazed at me admiringly, and then said, “You’re ‘deep’ Gipsy, I see, sir—­that’s what you are.”

“Mo rov a jaw; mo rakker so drovan?” I answered.  “Don’t talk so loud; do you think I want all the Gorgios around here to know I talk Gipsy?  Come in; jal adree the ker and pi a curro levinor.”

The tinker entered.  As with most Gipsies there was really, despite the want of “education,” a real politeness—­a singular intuitive refinement pervading all his actions, which indicated, through many centuries of brutalisation, that fountain-source of all politeness—­the Oriental.  Many a time I have found among Gipsies whose life, and food, and dress, and abject ignorance, and dreadful poverty were far below that of most paupers and prisoners, a delicacy in speaking to and acting before ladies, and a tact in little things, utterly foreign to the great majority of poor Anglo-Saxons, and not by any means too common in even higher classes.

For example, there was a basket of cakes on the table, which cakes were made like soldiers in platoons.  Now Mr Katzimengro, or Scissorman, as I call him, not being familiar with the anatomy of such delicate and winsome maro, or bread, was startled to find, when he picked up one biscuit de Rheims, that he had taken a row.  Instantly he darted at me an astonished and piteous glance, which said—­

“I cannot, with my black tinker fingers, break off and put the cakes back again; I do not want to take all—­it looks greedy.”

So I said, “Put them in your pocket.”  And he did so, quietly.  I have never seen anything done with a better grace.

On the easel hung an unfinished picture, representing the Piper of Hamelin surrounded by rats without number.  The Gipsy appeared to be much interested in it.