Chapter V: A Gypsy Letter (1)

All the gypsies in the country are not upon the roads. Many of them live in houses, and that very respectably, nay, even aristocratically. Yea, and it may be, O reader, that thou hast met them and knowest them not, any more than thou knowest many other deep secrets of the hearts and lives of those who live around thee. Dark are the ways of the Romany, strange his paths, even when reclaimed from the tent and the van. It is, however, intelligible enough that the Rom converted to the true faith of broadcloth garments by Poole, or dresses by Worth, as well as to the holy gospel of daily baths and _savon au violet_, should say as little as possible of his origin. For the majority of the world being snobs, they continually insist that all blood unlike their own is base, and the child of the _kalorat_, knowing this, sayeth naught, and ever carefully keeps the lid of silence on the pot of his birth. And as no being that ever was, is, or will be ever enjoyed holding a secret, playing a part, or otherwise entering into the deepest mystery of life--which is to make a joke of it--so thoroughly as a gypsy, it follows that the being respectable has to him a raciness and drollery and pungency and point which passeth faith. It has often occurred to me, and the older I grow the more I find it true, that the _real_ pleasure which bank presidents, moral politicians, not a few clergymen, and most other highly representative good men take in having a high character is the exquisite secret consciousness of its being utterly undeserved. They love acting. Let no man say that the love of the drama is founded on the artificial or sham. I have heard the Reverend Histriomastix war and batter this on the pulpit; but the utterance _per se_ was an actual, living lie. He was acting while he preached. Love or hunger is not more an innate passion than acting. The child in the nursery, the savage by the Nyanza or in Alaska, the multitude of great cities, all love to bemask and seem what they are not. Crush out carnivals and masked balls and theatres, and lo, you! the disguising and acting and masking show themselves in the whole community. Mawworm and Aminidab Sleek then play a role in every household, and every child becomes a wretched little Roscius. Verily I say unto you, the fewer actors the more acting; the fewer theatres the more stages, and the worse. Lay it to heart, study it deeply, you who believe that the stage is an open door to hell, for the chances are ninety and nine to one that if this be true _you_ will end by consciously or unconsciously keeping a private little gate thereunto. Beloved, put this in thy pipe and fumigate it, that acting in some form is a human instinct which cannot be extinguished, which never has been and never will be; and this being so, is it not better, with Dr. Bellows, to try to put it into proper form than to crush it? Truly it has been proved that with this, as with a certain other unquenchable penchant of humanity, when you suppress a score of professionals you create a thousand zealous amateurs. There was never in this world a stage on which mere acting was more skillfully carried out than in all England under Cromwell, or in Philadelphia under the Quakers. Eccentric dresses, artificial forms of language, separate and "peculiar" expressions of character unlike those of "the world," were all only giving a form to that craving for being odd and queer which forms the soul of masking and acting. Of course people who act all the time object to the stage. _Le diable ne veut pas de miroir_.

The gypsy of society not always, but yet frequently, retains a keen interest in his wild ancestry. He keeps up the language; it is a delightful secret; he loves now and then to take a look at "the old thing." Closely allied to the converted sinners are the _aficionados_, or the ladies and gentlemen born with unconquerable Bohemian tastes, which may be accounted for by their having been themselves gypsies in preexistent lives. No one can explain how or why it is that the _aficion_ comes upon them. It is _in_ them. I know a very learned man in England, a gentleman of high position, one whose name is familiar to my readers. He could never explain or understand why from early childhood he had felt himself drawn towards the wanderers. When he was only ten years old he saved up all his little store of pence wherewith to pay a tinker to give him lessons in Romany, in which tongue he is now a Past Grand. I know ladies in England and in America, both of the blood and otherwise, who would give up a ball of the highest flight in society, to sit an hour in a gypsy tent, and on whom a whispered word of Romany acts like wild-fire. Great as my experience has been I can really no more explain the intensity of this yearning, this _rapport_, than I can fly. My own fancy for gypsydom is faint and feeble compared to what I have found in many others. It is in them like the love for opium, for music, for love itself, or for acting. I confess that there is to me a nameless charm in the strangely, softly flowing language, which gives a sweeter sound to every foreign word which it adopts, just as the melody of a forest stream is said to make more musical the songs of the birds who dwell beside it. Thus Wentzel becomes Wenselo and Anselo; Arthur, Artaros; London, Lundra; Sylvester, Westaros. Such a phrase as "_Dordi_! _dovelo adoi_?" (See! what is that there?) could not be surpassed for mere beauty of sound.

It is apropos of living double lives, and playing parts, and the charm of stealing away unseen, like naughty children, to romp with the tabooed offspring of outlawed neighbors, that I write this, to introduce a letter from a lady, who has kindly permitted me to publish it. It tells its own story of two existences, two souls in one. I give it as it was written, first in Romany, and then in English:--

_Febmunti_ 1_st_.

MIRO KAMLO PAL,--Tu tevel mishto ta shun te latcherdum me akovo
kurikus tacho Romany tan akai adre o gav. Buti kamaben lis sas ta
dikk mori foki apopli; buti kushti ta shun moro jib. Mi-duvel atch
apa mande, si ne shomas pash naflo o Gorginess, vonk' akovo vias. O
waver divvus sa me viom fon a swell saleskro haben, dikdom me dui
Romani chia beshin alay apre a longo skamin adre --- Square. Kalor
yakkor, kalor balyor, lullo diklas apre i sherria, te lender trushnia
aglal lender piria. Mi-duvel, shomas pash divio sar kamaben ta dikav
lender! Avo! kairdum o wardomengro hatch i graia te sheldom avri,
"_Come here_!" Yon penden te me sos a rani ta dukker te vian sig
adosta. Awer me saldom te pendom adre Romanis: "Sarishan miri
dearis! Tute don't jin mandy's a Romany!" Yon nastis patser lende
kania nera yakkor. "Mi-duvel! Sa se tiro nav? putchde yeck. "Miro
nav se Britannia Lee." Kenna-sig yon diktas te me sos tachi, te
penden amengi lender navia shanas M. te D. Lis sos duro pa lende ta
jin sa a Romani rani astis jiv amen Gorgios, te dikk sa Gorgious,
awer te vel kushti Romani aja, te tevel buoino lakis kaloratt. Buti
rakkerdem apre mori foki, buti nevvi, buti savo sos rumado, te beeno,
te puredo, savo sos vino fon o puro tem, te butikumi aja kekkeno sos
rakkerben sa gudli. M. pende amengi, "Mandy don't jin how tute can
jiv among dem Gorgies." Pukerdom anpali: "Mandy dont jiv, mandy mers
kairin amen lender." Yon mangades mande ta well ta dikk a len, adre
lendes ker apre o chumba kai atchena pa o wen. Pende M., "Av miri
pen ta ha a bitti sar mendi. Tute jins the chais are only kerri
aratti te Kurrkus."

Sunday sala miri pen te me ghion adoi te latchedon o ker. O tan sos
bitto, awer sa i Romanis pende, dikde boro adosta paller jivin adre o
wardo. M. sos adoi te lakis roms dye, a kushti puri chai. A. sar
shtor chavia. M. kerde haben sa mendui viom adoi. I puri dye sos
mishto ta dikk mande, yoi kamde ta jin sar trustal mande. Rakkerdem
buti aja, te yoi pende te yoi ne kekker latchde a Romani rani denna
mande. Pendom me ke laki shan adre society kumi Romani rania, awer i
galderli Gorgios ne jinena lis.

Yoi pende sa miri pen dikde simlo Lusha Cooper, te siggerde lakis
kaloratt butider denna me. "Tute don't favor the Coopers, miri
dearie! Tute pens tiri dye rummerd a mush navvered Smith. Was adovo
the Smith as lelled kellin te kurin booths pasher Lundra Bridge? Sos
tute beeno adre Anglaterra?" Pukkerdom me ke puri dye sar jinav me
trustal miri kokeri te simensi. Tu jinsa shan kek Gorgies sa
longi-bavoli apre genealogies, sa i puri Romani dyia. Vonka foki
nastis chin lende adre lilia, rikkerena lende aduro adre lendros
sherria. _Que la main droit perd recueille la gauche_.

"Does tute jin any of the ---'s?" pende M. "Tute dikks sim ta ---'s
juva." "Ne kekker, yois too pauno,' pens A. "It's chomani adre the
look of her," pende M.

Dikkpali miro pal. Tu jinsa te --- sos i chi savo dudikabinde
manush, navdo --- buti wongur. Vanka yoi sos lino apre, o
Beshomengro pende ta ker laki chiv apre a shuba sims Gorgios te
adenne lelled laki adre a tan sar desh te dui gorgi chaia. ---
astissa pen i chai savo chorde lestis lovvo. Vanka yoi vias adre o
tan, yoi ghias sig keti laki, te pende: "Jinava me laki talla lakis
longi vangusti, te rinkeni mui. Yoi sos stardi dui beshya, awer o
Gorgio kekker las leski vongur pali."

Savo-chirus mendi rakkerden o wuder pirido, te trin manushia vian
adre. . . . Pali lenders sarishans, M. shelde avri: "Av ta misali,
rikker yer skammins longo tute! Mrs. Lee, why didn't tute bring yer
rom?" "Adenna me shom kek rumadi." "Mi-duvel, Britannia!" pende ---
"M. pende amengy te tu sos rumado." "M. didn't dukker tacho vonka
yoi dukkerd adovo. Yois a dinneli," pendom me. Te adenne sar mendi
saden atut M. Haben sos kushto, loim a kani, ballovas te puvengros,
te kushto curro levina. Liom mendi kushto paiass dre moro puro
Romany dromus. Rinkenodiro sos, kerde mande pash ta ruv, shomas sa
kushto-bakno ta atch yecker apopli men mori foki. Sos "Britannia!"
akai, te "Britannia!" doi, te sar sa adre o puro cheirus, vonka chavi
shomas. Ne patserava me ta Dante chinde:--

"Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi dei tempi felici."

Talla me shomas kushto-bakno ta pen apre o puro chirus. Sar lende
piden miro kamaben Romaneskaes, sar gudlo; talla H. Yov pende nastis
ker lis, pa yuv kenna lias tabuti. Kushto dikin Romnichal yuv. Tu
tevel jin lesti sarakai pa Romani, yuv se sa kalo. Te _avec l'air
indefinnissable du vrai Bohemien_. Yuv patserde me ta piav miro
sastopen wavescro chirus. Kana shomas pa misali, geero vias keti
ian; dukkeriben kamde yov. Hunali sos i puri dye te pendes amergi,
"Beng lel o puro jukel for wellin vanka mendi shom hain, te kenna tu
shan akai, miri Britannia Yov ne tevel lel kek kushto bak. Mandy'll
pen leste a wafedo dukkerin." Adoi A. putcherde mengy, "Does tute
dukker or sa does tute ker." "Miri pen, mandy'll pen tute tacho.
Mandy dukkers te dudikabins te kers buti covvas. Shom a tachi Romani
chovihani." "Tacho! tacho!" saden butider. Miri pen te me rikkerdem
a boro matto-morricley pa i chavis. Yon beshden alay apre o purj,
hais lis. Rinkeno _picture_ sas, pendom dikkav mande te miri penia
te pralia kenna shomas bitti. Latcherdom me a tani kali chavi of
panj besh chorin levina avri miro curro. Dikde, sar lakis bori kali
yakka te kali balia simno tikno Bacchante, sa yoi prasterde adrom.

Pendom parako pa moro kushto-bakeno chirus--"kushto bak" te "kushto
divvus." Mendi diom moro tachopen ta well apopli, te kan viom kerri.
Patserava dikk tute akai talla o prasterin o ye graia. Kushto bak te
kushto ratti.

Sarja tiro pen,

BRITANNIA LEE.

TRANSLATION.

_February_ 1_st_.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--You will be glad to learn that I, within the week,
found a real Romany family (place) here in this town. Charming it
was to find our folk again; pleasant it was to listen to our tongue.
The Lord be on me! but I was half sick of Gentiles and their ways
till this occurred. The other day, as I was returning from a highly
aristocratic breakfast, where we had winter strawberries with the
_creme de la creme_, I saw two gypsy women sitting on a bench in ---
Square. Black eyes, black hair, red kerchiefs on their heads, their
baskets on the ground before their feet. Dear Lord! but I was half
wild with delight at seeing them. Aye, I made the coachman stop the
horses, and cried aloud, "Come here!" They thought I was a lady to
fortune-tell, and came quickly. But I laughed, and said in Romany,
"How are you, my dears? You don't know that I am a gypsy." They
could not trust their very ears or eyes! At length one said, "My
God! what _is_ your name?" "My name's Britannia Lee," and, at a
glance, they saw that I was to be trusted, and a Romany. Their
names, they said, were M. and D. It was hard (far) for them to
understand how a Romany lady _could_ live among Gentiles, and look so
Gorgious, and yet be a true gypsy withal, and proud of her dark
blood. Much they talked about our people; much news I heard,--much
as to who was married and born and buried, who was come from the old
country, and much more. Oh, _never_ was such news so sweet to me!
M. said, "I don't know how you _can_ live among the Gentiles." I
answered, "I don't live; I _die_, living in their houses with them."
They begged me then to come and see them in their home, upon the
hill, where they are wintering. M. said, "Come, my sister, and eat a
little with us. You know that the women are only at home at night
and on Sunday."

Sunday morning, sister and I went there, and found the house. It was
a little place, but, as they said, after the life in wagons it seemed
large. M. was there, and her husband's mother, a nice old woman;
also A., with four children. M. was cooking as we entered. The old
mother was glad to see us; she wished to know all about us. All
talked, indeed, and that quite rapidly, and she said that I was the
first Romany lady {279} she had ever seen. I said to her that in
society are many gypsy ladies to be found, but that the wretched
Gentiles do not know it.

She said that my sister looked like Lusha Cooper, and showed her dark
blood more than I do. "You don't favor the Coopers, my dearie. You
say your mother married a Smith. Was that the Smith who kept a
dancing and boxing place near London Bridge? Were you born in
England?" I told the old mother all I knew about myself and my
relations. You know that no Gorgios are so long-winded on
genealogies as old mothers in Rom. When people don't write them down
in their family Bibles, they carry them, extended, in their heads.
_Que la main droit perd recueille la gauche_.

"Do you know any of the ---'s?" said M. "You look like ---'s wife."
"No; she's too pale," said A. "It's something in the look of her,"
said M.

Reflect, my brother. You know that --- was the woman who "cleaned
out" a man named --- of a very large sum {280} by "dukkeripen" and
"dudikabin." "When she was arrested, the justice made her dress like
any Gorgio, and placed her among twelve Gentile women. The man who
had been robbed was to point out who among them had stolen his money.
When she came into the room, he went at once to her, and said, 'I
know her by her long skinny fingers and handsome face.' She was
imprisoned for two years, but the Gorgio never recovered his money."

What time we reasoned thus, the door undid, and three men entered.
After their greetings, M. cried, "Come to table; bring your chairs
with you!" "Mrs. Lee, why didn't you bring your husband?" "Because
I am not married." "Lord! Britannia! Why, M. told me that you
were." "Ah, M. didn't fortune right when she fortuned that. She's a
fool," quoth I. And then we all laughed like children. The food was
good: chickens and ham and fried potatoes, with a glass of sound ale.
We were gay as flies in summer, in the real old Romany way. 'T was
"Britannia" here, "Britannia" there, as in the merry days when we
were young. Little do I believe in Dante's words,--

"Nessun maggior dolore,
Che ricordarsi dei tempi felici."

"There is no greater grief
Than to remember by-gone happy days."

For it is always happiness to me to think of good old times when I
was glad. All drank my health, _Romaneskaes_, together, with a
shout,--all save H., who said he had already had too much.
Good-looking gypsy, that! You'd know him anywhere for Romany, he is
so dark,--_avec l'air indefinissable du vrai Bohemien_. He promised
to drink my health another time.

As we sat, a gentleman came in below, wishing to have his fortune
told. I remember to have read that the Pythoness of Delphian oracle
prepared herself for _dukkerin_, or presaging, by taking a few drops
of cherry-laurel water. (I have had it prescribed for my eyes as R
_aq. laur. cerasi. fiat lotio_,--possibly to enable me to see into
the future.) Perhaps it was the cherry-brandy beloved of British
matrons and Brighton school-girls, taken at Mutton's. _Mais revenons
a nos moutons_. The old mother had taken, not cherry-laurel water,
nor even cherry-brandy, but joly good ale, and olde, which, far from
fitting her to reveal the darksome lore of futurity, had rendered her
loath to leave the festive board of the present. Wrathful was the
sybil, furious as the Vala when waked by Odin, angry as Thor when he
missed his hammer, to miss her merriment. "May the devil take the
old dog for coming when we are eating, and when thou art here, my
Britannia! Little good fortune will he hear this day. Evil shall be
the best I'll promise him." Thus spake the sorceress, and out she
went to keep her word. Truly it was a splendid picture this of "The
Enraged Witch," as painted by Hexenmeister von Teufel, of
Hollenstadt,--her viper eyes flashing infernal light and most
unchristian fire, shaking _les noirs serpents de ses cheveux_, as she
went forth. I know how, in an instant, her face was beautiful with
welcome, smiling like a Neapolitan at a cent; but the poor believer
caught it hot, all the same, and had a sleepless night over his
future fate. I wonder if the Pythoness of old, when summoned from a
_petit souper_, or a holy prophet called out of bed of a cold night,
to decide by royal command on the fate of Israel, ever "took it out"
on the untimely king by promising him a lively, unhappy time of it.
Truly it is fine to be behind the scenes and see how they work the
oracle. For the gentleman who came to consult my witch was a man of
might in the secrets of state, and one whom I have met in high
society. And, oh! _if_ he had known who it was that was up-stairs,
laughing at him for a fool!

While she was forth, A. asked me, "Do you tell fortunes, or _what_?"
"My sister," I replied, "I'll tell thee the truth. I do tell
fortunes. I keep a house for the purchase of stolen goods. I am
largely engaged in making counterfeit money and all kinds of forgery.
I am interested in burglary. I lie, swear, cheat, and steal, and get
drunk on Sunday. And I do many other things. I am a real Romany
witch." This little confession of faith brought down the house.
"Bravo! bravo!" they cried, laughing.

Sister and I had brought a great tipsy-cake for the children, and
they were all sitting under a table, eating it. It was a pretty
picture. I thought I saw in it myself and all my sisters and
brothers as we were once. Just such little gypsies and duckling
Romanys! And now! And then! What a comedy some lives are,--yea,
such lives as mine! And now it is _you_ who are behind the scenes;
anon, I shall change with you. _Va Pierre_, _vient Pierette_. Then
I surprised a little brown maiden imp of five summers stealing my
beer, and as she was caught in the act, and tore away shrieking with
laughter, she looked, with her great black eyes and flowing jetty
curling locks, like a perfect little Bacchante.

Then we said, "Thank you for the happy time!" "Good luck!" and "Good
day!" giving our promises to come again. So we went home all well.
I hope to see you at the races here. Good luck and good-night also
to you.

Always your friend,

BRITANNIA LEE

I have somewhat abbreviated the Romany text of this letter, and Miss Lee herself has somewhat polished and enlarged the translation, which is strictly fit and proper, she being a very different person in English from what she is in gypsy, as are most of her kind. This letter may be, to many, a strange lesson, a quaint essay, a social problem, a fable, an epigram, or a frolic,--just as they choose to take it. To me it is a poem. Thou, my friend, canst easily understand why all that is wild and strange, out-of-doors, far away by night, is worthy of being Tennysoned or Whitmanned. If there be given unto thee stupendous blasted trees, looking in the moonlight like the pillars of a vast and ghostly temple; the fall of cataracts down awful rocks; the wind wailing in wondrous language or whistling Indian melody all night on heath, rocks, and hills, over ancient graves and through lonely caves, bearing with it the hoot of the night-owl; while over all the stars look down in eternal mystery, like eyes reading the great riddle of the night which thou knowest not,--this is to thee like Ariel's song. To me and to us there are men and women who are in life as the wild river and the night-owl, as the blasted tree and the wind over ancient graves. No man is educated until he has arrived at that state of thought when a picture is quite the same as a book, an old gray-beard jug as a manuscript, men, women, and children as libraries. It was but yester morn that I read a cuneiform inscription printed by doves' feet in the snow, finding a meaning where in by-gone years I should have seen only a quaint resemblance. For in this by the _ornithomanteia_ known of old to the Chaldean sages I saw that it was neither from arrow-heads or wedges which gave the letters to the old Assyrians. When thou art at this point, then Nature is equal in all her types, and the city, as the forest, full of endless beauty and piquancy,--_in saecula saeculorum_.

I had written the foregoing, and had enveloped and directed it to be mailed, when I met in a lady-book entitled "Magyarland" with the following passages:--

"The gypsy girl in this family was a pretty young woman, with masses
of raven hair and a clear skin, but, notwithstanding her neat dress
and civilized surroundings, we recognized her immediately. It is, in
truth, not until one sees the Romany translated to an entirely new
form of existence, and under circumstances inconsistent with their
ordinary lives, that one realizes how completely different they are
from the rest of mankind in form and feature. Instead of disguising,
the garb of civilization only enhances the type, and renders it the
more apparent. No matter what dress they may assume, no matter what
may be their calling, no matter whether they are dwellers in tents or
houses, it is impossible for gypsies to disguise their origin. Taken
from their customary surroundings, they become at once an anomaly and
an anachronism, and present such an instance of the absurdity of
attempting to invert the order of nature that we feel more than ever
how utterly different they are from the human race; that there is a
key to their strange life which we do not possess,--a secret free
masonry that renders them more isolated than the veriest savages
dwelling in the African wilds,--and a hidden mystery hanging over
them and their origin that we shall never comprehend. They are
indeed a people so entirely separate and distinct that, in whatever
clime or quarter of the globe they may be met with, they are
instantly recognized; for with them forty centuries of association
with civilized races have not succeeded in obliterating one single
sign."

* * * * *

"Alas!" cried the princess; "I can never, never find the door of the
enchanted cavern, nor enter the golden cavern, nor solve its
wonderful mystery. It has been closed for thousands of years, and it
will remain closed forever."

"What flowers are those which thou holdest?" asked the hermit.

"Only primroses or Mary's-keys, {285} and tulips," replied the
princess.

"Touch the rock with them," said the hermit, "and the door will
open."

* * * * *

The lady writer of "Magyarland" held in her hand all the while, and knew it not, a beautiful primrose, which might have opened for her the mysterious Romany cavern. On a Danube steamboat she saw a little blind boy sitting all day all alone: only a little Slavonian peasant boy, "an odd, quaint little specimen of humanity, with loose brown garments, cut precisely like those of a grown-up man, and his bits of feet in little raw-hide moccasins." However, with a tender, gentle heart she began to pet the little waif. And the captain told her what the boy was. "He is a _guslar_, or minstrel, as they call them in Croatia. The Yougo-Slavs dedicate all male children who are born blind, from infancy, to the Muses. As soon as they are old enough to handle anything, a small mandolin is given them, which they are taught to play; after which they are taken every day into the woods, where they are left till evening to commune in their little hearts with nature. In due time they become poets, or at any rate rhapsodists, singing of the things they never saw, and when grown up are sent forth to earn their livelihood, like the troubadours of old, by singing from place to place, and asking alms by the wayside.

"It is not difficult for a Slav to become a poet; he takes in poetic sentiment as a river does water from its source. The first sounds he is conscious of are the words of his mother singing to him as she rocks his cradle. Then, as she watches the dawning of intelligence in his infant face, her mother language is that of poetry, which she improvises at the moment, and though he never saw the flowers nor the snow-capped mountains, nor the flowing streams and rivers, he describes them out of his inner consciousness, and the influence which the varied sounds of nature have upon his mind."

Rock and river and greenwood tree, sweet-spiced spring flower, rustling grass, and bird-singing nature and freedom,--this is the secret of the poets' song and of the Romany, and there is no other mystery in either. He who sleeps on graves rises mad or a poet; all who lie on the earth, which is the grave and cradle of nature, and who live _al fresco_, understand gypsies as well as my lady Britannia Lee. Nay, when some natures take to the Romany they become like the Norman knights of the Pale, who were more Paddyfied than the Paddies themselves. These become leaders among the gypsies, who recognize the fact that one renegade is more zealous than ten Turks. As for the "mystery" of the history of the gypsies, it is time, sweet friends, that 't were ended. When we know that there is to-day, in India, a sect and set of Vauriens, who are there considered Gipsissimae, and who call themselves, with their wives and language and being, Rom, Romni, and Romnipana, even as they do in England; and when we know, moreover, that their faces proclaim them to be Indian, and that they have been a wandering caste since the dawn of Hindu history, we have, I trow, little more to seek. As for the rest, you may read it in the great book of Out-of Doors, _capitulo nullo folio nigro_, or wherever you choose to open it, written as distinctly, plainly, and sweetly as the imprint of a school-boy's knife and fork on a mince-pie, or in the uprolled rapture of the eyes of Britannia when she inhaleth the perfume of a fresh bunch of Florentine violets. _Ite missa est_.

GYPSIES IN THE EAST.

Noon in Cairo.

A silent old court-yard, half sun and half shadow in which quaintly graceful, strangely curving columns seem to have taken from long companionship with trees something of their inner life, while the palms, their neighbors, from long in-door existence, look as if they had in turn acquired household or animal instincts, if not human sympathies. And as the younger the race the more it seeks for poets and orators to express in thought what it only feels, so these dumb pillars and plants found their poet and orator in the fountain which sang or spoke for them strangely and sweetly all night and day, uttering for them not only their waking thoughts, but their dreams. It gave a voice, too, to the ancient Persian tiles and the Cufic inscriptions which had seen the caliphs, and it told endless stories of Zobeide and Mesrour and Haroun al Raschid.

Beyond the door which, when opened, gave this sight was a dark ancient archway twenty yards long, which opened on the glaring, dusty street, where camels with their drivers and screaming _sais_, or carriage-runners and donkey-boys and crying venders, kept up the wonted Oriental din. But just within the archway, in its duskiest corner, there sat all day a living picture, a dark and handsome woman, apparently thirty years old, who was unveiled. She had before her a cloth and a few shells; sometimes an Egyptian of the lower class stopped, and there would be a grave consultation, and the shells would be thrown, and then further solemn conference and a payment of money and a departure. And it was world-old Egyptian, or Chaldean, as to custom, for the woman was a Rhagarin, or gypsy, and she was one of the diviners who sit by the wayside, casting shells for auspices, even as shells and arrows were cast of old, to be cursed by Israel.

It is not remarkable that among the myriad _manteias_ of olden days there should have been one by shells. The sound of the sea as heard in the nautilus or conch, when

"It remembers its august abode
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there,"

is very strange to children, and I can remember how in childhood I listened with perfect faith to the distant roaring, and marveled at the mystery of the ocean song being thus forever kept alive, inland. Shells seem so much like work of human hands, and are often so marked as with letters, that it is not strange that faith soon found the supernatural in them. The magic shell of all others is the cowrie. Why the Roman ladies called it _porcella_, or little pig, because it has a pig's back, is the objective explanation of its name, and how from its gloss that name, or porcellana, was transferred to porcelain, is in books. But there is another side to the shell, and another or esoteric meaning to "piggy," which was also known to the _dames du temps jadis_, to Archipiada and Thais, _qui fut la belle Romaine_,--and this inner meaning makes of it a type of birth or creation. Now all that symbolizes fertility, birth, pleasure, warmth, light, and love is opposed to barrenness, cold, death, and evil; whence it follows that the very sight of a shell, and especially of a cowrie, frightens away the devils as well as a horse-shoe, which by the way has also its cryptic meaning. Hence it was selected to cast for luck, a world-old custom, which still lingers in the game of props; and for the same reason it is hung on donkeys, the devil being still scared away by the sight of a cowrie, even as he was scared away of old by its prototype, as told by Rabelais.

As the sibyls sat in caves, so the sorceress sat in the dark archway, immovable when not sought, mysterious as are all her kind, and something to wonder at. It was after passing her, and feeling by quick intuition what she was, that the court-yard became a fairy-land, and the fountain its poet, and the palm-trees Tamar maids. There are people who believe there is no mystery, that an analysis of the gypsy sorceress would have shown an ignorant outcast; but while nature gives chiaro-oscuro and beauty, and while God is the Unknown, I believe that the more light there is cast by science the more stupendous will be the new abysses of darkness revealed. These natures must be taken with the _life_ in them, not dead,--and their life is mystery. The Hungarian gypsy lives in an intense mystery, yes, in true magic in his singing. You may say that he cannot, like Orpheus, move rocks or tame beasts with his music. If he could he could do no more than astonish and move us, and he does that now, and the _why_ is as deep a mystery as that would be.

So far is it from being only a degrading superstition in those who believe that mortals like themselves can predict the future, that it seems, on the contrary ennobling. It is precisely because man feels a mystery within himself that he admits it may be higher in others; if spirits whisper to him in dreams and airy passages of trembling light, or in the music never heard but ever felt below, what may not be revealed to others? You may tell me if you will that prophecies are all rubbish and magic a lie, and it may be so,--nay, _is_ so, but the awful mystery of the Unknown without a name and the yearning to penetrate it _is_, and is all the more, because I have found all prophecies and jugglings and thaumaturgy fail to bridge over the abyss. It is since I have read with love and faith the evolutionists and physiologists of the most advanced type that the Unknown has become to me most wonderful, and that I have seen the light which never shone on sea or land as I never saw it before. And therefore to me the gypsy and all the races who live in freedom and near to nature are more poetic than ever. For which reason, after the laws of acoustics have fully explained to me why the nautilus sounds like a far off-ocean dirge, the unutterable longing _to know more_ seizes upon me,

"Till my heart is full of longing
For the secret of the sea,
And the heart of the great ocean
Sends a thrilling pulse through me."

That gypsy fortune-teller, sitting in the shadow, is, moreover, interesting as a living manifestation of a dead past. As in one of her own shells when petrified we should have the ancient form without its color, all the old elements being displaced by new ones, so we have the old magic shape, though every atom in it is different; the same, yet not the same Life in the future, and the divination thereof, was a stupendous, ever-present reality to the ancient Egyptian, and the sole inspiration of humanity when it produced few but tremendous results. It is when we see it in such living forms that it is most interesting. As in Western wilds we can tell exactly by the outline of the forests where the borders of ancient inland seas once ran, so in the great greenwood of history we can trace by the richness or absence of foliage and flower the vanished landmarks of poetry, or perceive where the enchantment whose charm has now flown like the snow of the foregone year once reigned in beauty. So a line of lilies has shown me where the sea-foam once fell, and pine-trees sang of masts preceding them.

"I sometimes think that never blows so red
The rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every hyacinth the garden wears
Dropt in her lap from some once lovely head." {292}

The memory of that court-yard reminds me that I possess two Persian tiles, each with a story. There is a house in Cairo which is said to be more or less contemporary with the prophet, and it is inhabited by an old white-bearded emir, more or less a descendant of the prophet. This old gentleman once gave as a precious souvenir to an American lady two of the beautiful old tiles from his house, whereof I had one. In the eyes of a Muslim there is a degree of sanctity attached to this tile, as one on which the eyes of the prophet may have rested,--or at least the eyes of those who were nearer to him than we are. Long after I returned from Cairo I wrote and published a fairy-book called Johnnykin, {292} in which occurred the following lines:--

Trust not the Ghoul, love,
Heed not his smile;
_Out of the Mosque_, _love_,
_He stole the tile_.

One day my friend the Palmer from over the sea came to me with a present. It was a beautiful Persian tile.

"Where did you get it?" I asked.

"I stole it out of a mosque in Syria."

"Did you ever read my Johnnykin?"

"Of course not."

"I know you never did." Here I repeated the verse. "But you remember what the Persian poet says:--

"'And never since the vine-clad earth was young
Was some great crime committed on the earth,
But that some poet prophesied the deed.'"

"True, and also what the great Tsigane poet sang:--

"'O manush te lela sossi choredo,
Wafodiro se te choramengro.'

"He who takes the stolen ring,
Is worse than he who stole the thing."

"And it would have been better for you, while you were _dukkerin_ or prophesying, to have prophesied about something more valuable than a tile."

And so it came to pass that the two Persian tiles, one given by a descendant of the Prophet, and the other the subject of a prophecy, rest in my cabinet side by side.

In Egypt, as in Austria, or Syria, or Persia, or India, the gypsies are the popular musicians. I had long sought for the derivation of the word _banjo_, and one day I found that the Oriental gypsies called a gourd by that name. Walking one day with the Palmer in Cambridge, we saw in a window a very fine Hindu lute, or in fact a real banjo made of a gourd. We inquired, and found that it belonged to a mutual friend, Mr. Charles Brookfield, one of the best fellows living, and who, on being forthwith "requisitioned" by the unanimous voice of all who sympathized with me in my need, sent me the instrument. "He did not think it right," he said, "to keep it, when Philology wanted it. If it had been any other party,--but he always had a particular respect and awe of her." I do not assert that this discovery settles the origin of the word _banjo_, but the coincidence is, to say the least, remarkable.

I saw many gypsies in Egypt, but learned little from them. What I found I stated in a work called the "Egyptian Sketch Book." It was to this effect: My first information was derived from the late Khedive Ismael, who during an interview with me said, "There are in Egypt many people known as Rhagarin, or Ghagarin, who are probably the same as the gypsies of Europe. They are wanderers, who live in tents, and are regarded with contempt even by the peasantry. Their women tell fortunes, tattoo, and sell small wares; the men work in iron. They are all adroit thieves, and noted as such. The men may sometimes be seen going round the country with monkeys. In fact, they appear to be in all respects the same people as the gypsies of Europe."

I habitually employed, while in Cairo, the same donkey-driver, an intelligent and well-behaved man named Mahomet, who spoke English fairly. On asking him if he could show me any Rhagarin, he replied that there was a fair or market held every Saturday at Boulac, where I would be sure to meet with women of the tribe. The men, he said, seldom ventured into the city, because they were subject to much insult and ill-treatment from the common people.

On the day appointed I rode to Boulac. The market was very interesting. I saw no European or Frangi there, except my companion, Baron de Cosson, who afterwards traveled far into the White Nile country, and who had with his brother Edward many remarkable adventures in Abyssinia, which were well recorded by the latter in a book. All around were thousands of blue-skirted and red-tarbouched or white-turbaned Egyptians, buying or selling, or else amusing themselves, but with an excess of outcry and hallo which indicates their grown child character. There were dealers in donkeys and horses roaring aloud, "He is for ten napoleons! Had I asked twenty you would have gladly given me fifteen!" "O true believers, here is a Syrian steed which will give renown to the purchaser!" Strolling loosely about were dealers in sugar-cane and pea-nuts, which are called gooba in Africa as in America, pipe peddlers and venders of rosaries, jugglers and minstrels. At last we came to a middle-aged woman seated on the ground behind a basket containing beads, glass armlets, and such trinkets. She was dressed like any Arab-woman of the lower class, but was not veiled, and on her chin blue lines were tattooed. Her features and expression were, however, gypsy, and not Egyptian. And as she sat there quietly I wondered how a woman could feel in her heart who was looked down upon with infinite scorn by an Egyptian, who might justly be looked down on in his turn with sublime contempt by an average American Methodist colored whitewasher who "took de 'Ledger.'" Yet there was in the woman the quiet expression which associates itself with respectability, and it is worth remarking that whenever a race is greatly looked down on by another from the stand-point of mere color, as in America, or mere religion, as in Mahometan lands, it always contains proportionally a larger number of _decent_ people than are to be found among those who immediately oppress it. An average Chinese is as a human being far superior to a hoodlum, and a man of color to the white man who cannot speak of him or to him except as a "naygur" or a "nigger." It is when a man realizes that he is superior in _nothing_ else save race, color, religion, family, inherited fortune, and their contingent advantages that he develops most readily into the prig and snob.

I spoke to the woman in Romany, using such words as would have been intelligible to any of her race in any other country; but she did not understand me, and declared that she could speak nothing but Arabic. At my request Mahomet explained to her that I had come from a distant country in Orobba, or Europe, where there were many Rhagarin, who said that their fathers came from Egypt, and that I wished to know if any in the old country could speak the old language. She replied that the Rhagarin of Montesinos could still speak it; but that her people in Egypt had lost the tongue. Mahomet, in translating, here remarked that Montesinos meant Mount Sinai or Syria. I then asked her if the Rhagarin had no peculiar name for themselves, and she answered, "Yes; we call ourselves Tataren."

This at least was satisfactory. All over Southern Germany and in Norway the gypsies are called Tartaren, and though the word means Tartars, and is misapplied, it indicates the race. The woman seemed to be much gratified at the interest I manifested in her people. I gave her a double piaster, and asked for its value in blue glass armlets. She gave me four, and as I turned to depart called me back, and with a good-natured smile handed me four more as a present. This generosity was very gypsy-like, and very unlike the habitual meanness of the ordinary Egyptian.

After this Mahomet took me to a number of Rhagarin. They all resembled the one whom I had seen, and all were sellers of small articles and fortune-tellers. They all differed slightly from common Egyptians in appearance, and were more unlike them in not being importunate for money, nor disagreeable in their manners. But though they were as certainly gypsies as old Charlotte Cooper herself, none of them could speak Romany. I used to amuse myself by imagining what some of my English gypsy friends would have done if turned loose in Cairo among their cousins. How naturally old Charlotte would have waylaid and "dukkered" and amazed the English ladies in the Muskee, and how easily that reprobate old amiable cosmopolite, the Windsor Frog, would have mingled with the motley mob of donkey-boys and tourists before Shepherd's Hotel, and appointed himself an _attache_ to their excursions to the Pyramids, and drunk their pale ale or anything else to their healths, and then at the end of the day have claimed a wage for his politeness! And how well the climate would have agreed with them, and how they would have agreed that it was of all lands the best for _tannin_, or tenting out, in the world!

The gypsiest-looking gypsy in Cairo, with whom I became somewhat familiar, was a boy of sixteen, a snake-charmer; a dark and even handsome youth, but with eyes of such wild wickedness that no one who had ever seen him excited could hope that he would ever become as other human beings. I believe that he had come, as do all of his calling, from a snake-catching line of ancestors, and that he had taken in from them, as did Elsie Venner, the serpent nature. They had gone snaking, generation after generation, from the days of the serpent worship of old, it may be back to the old Serpent himself; and this tawny, sinuous, active thing of evil, this boy, without the least sense of sympathy for any pain, who devoured a cobra alive with as much indifference as he had just shown in petting it, was the result. He was a human snake. I had long before reading the wonderfully original work of Doctor Holmes reflected deeply on the moral and immoral influences which serpent worship of old, in Syria and other lands, must have had upon its followers. But Elsie Venner sets forth the serpent nature as benumbed or suspended by cold New England winters and New England religions, moral and social influences; the Ophites of old and the Cairene gypsy showed the boy as warmed to life in lands whose winters are as burning summers. Elsie Venner is not sensual, and sensuality is the leading trait of the human-serpent nature. Herein lies an error, just as a sculptor would err who should present Lady Godiva as fully draped, or Sappho merely as a sweet singer of Lesbos, or Antinous only as a fine young man. He who would harrow hell and rake out the devil, and then exhibit to us an ordinary sinner, or an _opera bouffe_ "Mefistofele," as the result, reminds one of the seven Suabians who went to hunt a monster,--"_a Ungeheuer_,"--and returned with a hare. Elsie Venner is not a hare; she is a wonderful creation; but she is a winter-snake. I confess that I have no patience, however, with those who pretend to show us summer-snakes, and would fain dabble with vice; who are amateurs in the diabolical, and drawing-room dilettanti in damnation. Such, as I have said before, are the aesthetic adorers of Villon, whom the old _roue_ himself would have most despised, and the admirers of "Faustine," whom Faustina would have picked up between her thumb and finger, and eyed with serene contempt before throwing them out of the window. A future age will have for these would-be wickeds, who are only monks half turned inside out, more laughter than we now indulge in at Chloe and Strephon.

I always regarded my young friend Abdullah as a natural child of the devil and a serpent-souled young sinner, and he never disappointed me in my opinion of him. I never in my life felt any antipathy to serpents, and he evidently regarded me as a _sapengro_, or snake-master. The first day I met him he put into my hands a cobra which had the fangs extracted, and then handled an asp which still had its poison teeth. On his asking me if I was afraid of it, and my telling him "No," he gave it to me, and after I had petted it, he always manifested an understanding,--I cannot say sympathy. I should have liked to see that boy's sister, if he ever had one, and was not hatched out from some egg found in the desert by an Egyptian incubus or incubator. She must have been a charming young lady, and his mother must have been a beauty, especially when in court-dress,--with her broom _et praeterea nihil_. But neither, alas, could be ever seen by me, for it is written in the "Gittin" that there are three hundred species of male demons, but what the female herself is like is known to no one.

Abdullah first made his appearance before me at Shepherd's Hotel, and despite his amazing natural impudence, which appeared to such splendid advantage in the street that I always thought he must be a lineal descendant of the brazen serpent himself, he evinced a certain timidity which was to me inexplicable, until I recalled that the big snake of Irish legends had shown the same modesty when Saint Patrick wanted him to enter the chest which he had prepared for his prison. "Sure, it's a nate little house I've made for yees," said the saint, "wid an iligant parlor." "I don't like the look av it at all, at all," says the sarpent, as he squinted at it suspiciously, "and I'm loath to _inter_ it."

Abdullah looked at the parlor as if he too were loath to "inter" it; but he was in charge of one in whom his race instinctively trust, so I led him in. His apparel was simple: it consisted of a coarse shirt, very short, with a belt around the waist, and an old tarbouch on his head. Between the shirt and his bare skin, as in a bag, was about a half peck of cobras, asps, vipers, and similar squirming property; while between his cap and his hair were generally stowed one or two enormous living scorpions, and any small serpents that he could not trust to dwell with the larger ones. When I asked Abdullah where he contrived to get such vast scorpions and such lively serpents, he replied, "Out in the desert." I arranged, in fact, to go out with him some day a-snaking and scorp'ing, and have ever since regretted that I did not avail myself of the opportunity. He showed off his snakes to the ladies, and concluded by offering to eat the largest one alive before our eyes for a dollar, which price he speedily reduced to a half. There was a young New England lady present who was very anxious to witness this performance; but as I informed Abdullah that if he attempted anything of the kind I would kick him out-of-doors, snakes and all, he ceased to offer to show himself a cannibal. Perhaps he had learned what Rabbi Simon ben Yochai taught, that it is a good deed to smash the heads of the best of serpents, even as it is a duty to kill the best of Goyim. And if by Goyim he meant Philistines, I agree with him.