The English Gipsies And Their Language

London, in 1871, I was seated alone in an artist's studio. Suddenly I heard without, beneath the window, the murmur of two voices, and the sleepy, hissing, grating sound of a scissors- grinder's wheel. By me lay a few tools, one of which, a chisel, was broken. I took it, went softly to the window, and looked down. There was the wheel, including all the apparatus of a travelling tinker. I looked to see if I could discover in the two men who stood by it any trace of the Eommany. One, a fat, short, mind-his-owu- business, ragged son of the roads, who looked, however, as if a sturdy drinker might be hidden in his shell, was evidently not my " affair." He seemed to be the " Co." of the firm. But by him, and officiating at the wheeling smithy, stood a taller figure?the face to me invisible?whichI scrutinised more nearly. And the instant I observed his hat I said to myself, " This looks like it." For dilapidated, worn, wretched as that hat was, there was in it an attempt, though indescribably humble, to be something melo-dramatic, foreign, Bohemian, and poetic. It was the mere blind, dull, dead germ of an effort?not even life?only the ciliary movement of an antecedent embryo?and yet it had got beyond Anglo - Saxondom. No costermonger, or common cad, or true Englishman, ever yet had that indefinable touch of the opera-supernumerary in the streets. It was a sombrero. " That 'a the man for me," I said. So I called him, and gave him the chisel, and after a...