Very grave indeed was the assent yielded to this explanation.  He had heard it among other things.

My dear Mr Robert Browning, I little thought, when I suggested to the artist your poem of the piper, that I should ever retail the story in Rommany to a tinker.  But who knows with whom he may associate in this life, or whither he may drift on the great white rolling sea of humanity?  Did not Lord Lytton, unless the preface to Pelham err, himself once tarry in the tents of the Egyptians? and did not Christopher North also wander with them, and sing—­

   “Oh, little did my mother think,
      The day she cradled me,
   The lands that I should travel in,
      Or the death that I should dee;
   Or gae rovin’ about wi’ tinkler loons,
      And sic-like companie”?

“You know, sir,” said the Gipsy, “that we have two languages.  For besides the Rummany, there’s the reg’lar cant, which all tinkers talk.”

“Kennick you mean?”

“Yes, sir; that’s the Rummany for it.  A ‘dolly mort’ is Kennick, but it’s juva or rakli in Rummanis.  It’s a girl, or a rom’s chi.”

“You say rom sometimes, and then rum.”

“There’s rums and roms, sir.  The rum is a Gipsy, and a rom is a husband.”

“That’s your English way of calling it.  All the rest of the world over there is only one word among Gipsies, and that is rom.”

Now, the allusion to Kennick or cant by a tinker, recalls an incident which, though not strictly Gipsy in its nature, I will nevertheless narrate.

In the summer of 1870 I spent several weeks at Spa, in the Ardennes.  One day while walking I saw by the roadside a picturesque old tinker, looking neither better nor worse than the grinder made immortal by Teniers.

I was anxious to know if all of his craft in Belgium could speak Gipsy, and addressed him in that language, giving him at the same time my knife to grind.  He replied politely in French that he did not speak Rommany, and only understood French and Walloon.  Yet he seemed to understand perfectly the drift of my question, and to know what Gipsy was, and its nature, since after a pause he added, with a significant smile—­

“But to tell the truth, monsieur, though I cannot talk Rommany, I know another secret language.  I can speak Argot fluently.”

Now, I retain in my memory, from reading the Memoirs of Vidocq thirty years ago, one or two phrases of this French thieves’ slang, and I at once replied that I knew a few words of it myself, adding—­

“Tu sais jaspiner en bigorne?”—­you can talk argot?

“Oui, monsieur.”

“Et tu vas roulant de vergne en vergne?”—­and you go about from town to town?

Grave and keen, and with a queer smile, the tinker replied, very slowly—­