ein, and sold several
vials of his panacea, and then in due time ceased, and went into a
bar-room, which I also entered. I found him in what looked like
prospective trouble, for a policeman was insisting on purchasing his
medicine, and on having one of his hand-bills. He was remonstrating,
when I quietly said to him in Romany, "Don't trouble yourself; you were
not making any disturbance." He took no apparent notice of what I said
beyond an almost imperceptible wink, but soon left the room, and when I
had followed him into the street, and we were out of ear-shot, he
suddenly turned on me and said,--

"Well, you _are_ a swell, for a Romany. How do you do it up to such a
high peg?"

"Do what?"

"Do the whole lay,--look so gorgeous?"

"Why, I'm no better dressed than you are,--not so well, if you come to
that _vongree_" (waistcoat).

"'T isn't _that_,--'t isn't the clothes. It's the air and the style.
Anybody'd believe you'd had no end of an education. I could make ten
dollars a patter if I could do it as natural as you do. Perhaps you'd
like to come in on halves with me as a bonnet. _No_? Well, I suppose
you have a better line. You've been lucky. I tell you, you astonished
me when you _rakkered_, though I spotted you in the crowd for one who was
off the color of the common Gorgios,--or, as the Yahudi say, the _Goyim_.
No, I carn't _rakker_, or none to speak of, and noways as deep as you,
though I was born in a tent on Battersea Common and grew up a fly fakir.
What's the drab made of that I sell in these bottles? Why, the old fake,
of course,--you needn't say _you_ don't know that. _Italic good
English_. Yes, I know I do. A fakir is bothered out of his life and
chaffed out of half his business when he drops his _h_'s. A man can do
anything when he must, and I must talk fluently and correctly to succeed
in such a business. _Would I like a drop of something_? You paid for
the last, now you must take a drop with me. _Do I know of any Romany's
in town_? Lots of them. There is a ken in Lombard Street with a regular
fly mort,--but on second thoughts we won't go there,--_and_--oh, I say--a
very nice place in --- Street. The landlord is a Yahud; his wife can
_rakker_ you, I'm sure. _She's_ a good lot, too."

And while on the way I will explain that my acquaintance was not to be
regarded as a real gypsy. He was one of that large nomadic class with a
tinge of gypsy blood who have grown up as waifs and s