“And what is the cause?” said I, “for I am sure I do not know.”

“The cause is this,” said the jockey, “they never heard a bad word proceed from your mouth, and never knew you do a bad thing.”

“They are a singular people,” said I.

“And what a singular language they have got,” said the jockey.

“Do you know it?” said I.

“Only a few words,” said the jockey, “they were always chary in teaching me any.”

“They were vary sherry to me too,” said the Hungarian, speaking in broken English; “I only could learn from them half-a-dozen words, for example, gul eray, which, in the czigany of my country, means sweet gentleman; or edes ur in my own Magyar.”

“Gudlo Rye, in the Romany of mine, means a sugar’d gentleman,” said I; “then there are gypsies in your country?”

“Plenty,” said the Hungarian, speaking German, “and in Russia and Turkey too; and wherever they are found, they are alike in their ways and language.  Oh, they are a strange race, and how little known!  I know little of them, but enough to say, that one horse-load of nonsense has been written about them; there is one Valter Scott—­”

“Mind what you say about him,” said I; “he is our grand authority in matters of philology and history.”

“A pretty philologist,” said the Hungarian, “who makes the gypsies speak Roth-Welsch, the dialect of thieves; a pretty historian, who couples together Thor and Tzernebock.”

“Where does he do that?” said I.

“In his conceited romance of ‘Ivanhoe,’ he couples Thor and Tzernebock together, and calls them gods of the heathen Saxons.”

“Well,” said I, “Thur or Thor was certainly a god of the heathen Saxons.”

“True,” said the Hungarian; “but why couple him with Tzernebock?  Tzernebock was a word which your Valter had picked up somewhere without knowing the meaning.  Tzernebock was no god of the Saxons, but one of the gods of the Sclaves, on the southern side of the Baltic.  The Sclaves had two grand gods to whom they sacrificed, Tzernebock and Bielebock; that is, the black and white gods, who represented the powers of dark and light.  They were overturned by Waldemar, the Dane, the great enemy of the Sclaves; the account of whose wars you will find in one fine old book, written by Saxo Gramaticus, which I read in the library of the college of Debreczen.  The Sclaves, at one time, were masters of all the southern shore of the Baltic, where their descendants are still to be found, though they have lost their language, and call themselves Germans; but the word Zernevitz near Dantzic, still attests that the Sclavic language was once common in those parts.  Zernevitz means the thing of blackness, as Tzernebock means the god of blackness.  Prussia itself merely means, in Sclavish, Lower Russia.  There is scarcely a race or language in the world more extended than the Sclavic.  On the other side of the Dunau you