is quite unlike those of England, who, even when they are astonished
"out of their senses" at being addressed in Romany by a gentleman, make
the most red-Indian efforts to conceal their amazement. But I speedily
found that these Russian gypsies were as unaffected and child-like as
they were gentle in manner, and that they compared with our own
prize-fighting, sturdy-begging, always-suspecting Romany roughs and
_rufianas_ as a delicate greyhound might compare with a very shrewd old
bull-dog, trained by an unusually "fly" tramp.

That the girls were first to the fore in questioning me will be doubted
by no one. But we had great trouble in effecting a mutual understanding.
Their Romany was full of Russian; their pronunciation puzzled me; they
"bit off their words," and used many in a strange or false sense. Yet,
notwithstanding this, I contrived to converse pretty readily with the
men,--very readily with the captain, a man as dark as Ben Lee, to those
who know Benjamin, or as mahogany, to those who know him not. But with
the women it was very difficult to converse. There is a theory current
that women have a specialty of tact and readiness in understanding a
foreigner, or in making themselves understood; it may be so with
cultivated ladies, but it is my experience that, among the uneducated,
men have a monopoly of such quick intelligence. In order fully to
convince them that we really had a tongue in common, I repeated perhaps a
hundred nouns, giving, for instance, the names of various parts of the
body, of articles of apparel and objects in the room, and I believe that
we did not find a single word which, when pronounced distinctly by
itself, was not intelligible to us all. I had left in London a
Russo-Romany vocabulary, once published in "The Asiatic Magazine," and I
had met with Bohtlinghk's article on the dialect, as well as specimens of
it in the works of Pott and Miklosich, but had unfortunately learned
nothing of it from them. I soon found, however, that I knew a great many
more gypsy words than did my new friends, and that our English Romany far
excels the Russian in _copia verborum_.

"But I must sit down." I observed on this and other occasions that
Russian gypsies are very naif. And as it is in human nature to prefer
sitting by a pretty girl, these Slavonian Romanys so arrange it according
to the principles of natural selection--or natural politeness--that, when
a stranger is in their gates, the two pr