("They told me to hide the horse, but I forgot to do it, and the man who owned the horse came by and saw it.”)

It is only a few hours since I heard of a gentleman who took incredible pains to induce the Gipsies to teach him their language, but never succeeded.  I must confess that I do not understand this.  When I have met strange Gipsies, it has often greatly grieved me to find that they spoke their ancient tongue very imperfectly, and were ignorant of certain Rommany words which I myself, albeit a stranger, knew very well, and would fain teach them.  But instead of accepting my instructions in a docile spirit of ignorant humility, I have invariably found that they were eagerly anxious to prove that they were not so ignorant as I assumed, and in vindication of their intelligence proceeded to pour forth dozens of words, of which I must admit many were really new to me, and which I did not fail to remember.

The scouting, slippery night-life of the Gipsy; his familiarity with deep ravine and lonely wood-path, moonlight and field-lairs; his use of a secret language, and his constant habit of concealing everything from everybody; his private superstitions, and his inordinate love of humbugging and selling friend and foe, tend to produce in him that goblin, elfin, boyish-mischievous, out-of-the-age state of mind which is utterly indescribable to a prosaic modern-souled man, but which is delightfully piquant to others.  Many a time among Gipsies I have felt, I confess with pleasure, all the subtlest spirit of fun combined with picture-memories of Hayraddin Maugrabin—­witch-legends and the “Egyptians;” for in their ignorance they are still an unconscious race, and do not know what the world writes about them.  They are not attractive from the outside to those who have no love for quaint scholarship, odd humours, and rare fancies.  A lady who had been in a camp had nothing to say of them to me save that they were “dirty—­dirty, and begged.”  But I ever think, when I see them, of Tieck’s Elves, and of the Strange Valley, which was so grim and repulsive from without, but which, once entered, was the gay forecourt of goblin-land.

The very fact that they hide as much as they can of their Gipsy life and nature from the Gorgios would of itself indicate the depths of singularity concealed beneath their apparent life—­and this reminds me of incidents in a Sunday which I once passed beneath a Gipsy roof.  I was, en voyage, at a little cathedral town, when learning that some Gipsies lived in a village eight miles distant, I hired a carriage and rode over to see them.  I found my way to a neat cottage, and on entering it discovered that I was truly enough among the Rommany.  By the fire sat a well-dressed young man; near him was a handsome, very dark young woman, and there presently entered a very old woman,—­all gifted with the unmistakable and peculiar expression of real Gipsies.

The old woman overwhelmed me with compliments and greetings.  She is a local celebrity, and is constantly visited by the most respectable ladies and gentlemen.  This much I had learned from my coachman.  But I kept a steady silence, and sat as serious as Odin when he visited the Vala, until the address ceased.  Then I said in Rommany—­