“Well,” I replied, “I see that a great many things can be learned from the Gipsies.  Tell me, now, when you wanted a night’s lodging did you ever go to a union?”

“Kek, rya; the tramps that jal langs the drum an’ mang at the unions are kek Rommany chals.  The Rommany never kair dovo—­they’d sooner besh in the bavol puv firstus.  We’d putch the farming rye for mukkaben to hatch the ratti adree the granja,but we’d sooner suv under the bor in the bishnoo than jal adree the chuvveny-ker.  The Rommany chals aint sim to tramps, for they’ve got a different drum into ’em.”

In English:  “No, sir; the tramps that go along the road and beg at the unions are not Gipsies.  The Rommany never do that—­they’d sooner stay in the open field (literally, air-field).  We would ask the farmer for leave to stop the night in the barn, but we’d sooner sleep under the hedge in the rain than go in the poorhouse.  Gipsies are not like tramps, for they have a different way.”

The reader who will reflect on the extreme misery and suffering incident upon sleeping in the open air, or in a very scanty tent, during the winter in England, and in cold rains, will appreciate the amount of manly pride necessary to sustain the Gipsies in thus avoiding the union.  That the wandering Rommany can live at all is indeed wonderful, since not only are all other human beings less exposed to suffering than many of them, but even foxes and rabbits are better protected in their holes from storms and frost.  The Indians of North America have, without exception, better tents; in fact, one of the last Gipsy tans which I visited was merely a bit of ragged canvas, so small that it could only cover the upper portion of the bodies of the man and his wife who slept in it.  Where and how they packed their two children I cannot understand.

The impunity with which any fact might be published in English Rommany, with the certainty that hardly a soul in England not of the blood could understand it, is curiously illustrated by an incident which came within my knowledge.  The reader is probably aware that there appear occasionally in the “Agony” column of the Times (or in that devoted to “personal” advertisements) certain sentences apparently written in some very strange foreign tongue, but which the better informed are aware are made by transposing letters according to the rules of cryptography or secret writing.  Now it is estimated that there are in Great Britain at least one thousand lovers of occult lore and quaint curiosa, decipherers of rebuses and adorers of anagrams, who, when one of these delightful puzzles appears in the Times, set themselves down and know no rest until it is unpuzzled and made clear, being stimulated in the pursuit by the delightful consciousness that they are exploring the path of somebody’s secret, which somebody would be very sorry to have made known.

Such an advertisement appeared one day, and a friend of mine, who had a genius for that sort of thing, sat himself down early one Saturday morning to decipher it.