est blood of the oldest families. To him I
said,--

"_Rakessa tu Romanes_?" (Can you talk gypsy?)

"I know what you mean," he answered in English. "You ask me if I can
talk gypsy. I know what those people are. But I'm a Mahometan Hindu
from Calcutta. I get my living by making curry powder. Here is my
card." Saying this he handed me a piece of paper, with his name written
on it: _John Nano_.

"When I say to you, '_Rakessa tu Romanes_?' what does it mean?"

"It means, 'Can you talk Rom?' But _rakessa_ is not a Hindu word. It's
Panjabi."

I met John Nano several times afterwards and visited him in his lodgings,
and had him carefully examined and cross-questioned and pumped by
Professor Palmer of Cambridge, who is proficient in Eastern tongues. He
conversed with John in Hindustani, and the result of our examination was
that John declared he had in his youth lived a very loose life, and
belonged to a tribe of wanderers who were to all the other wanderers on
the roads in India what regular gypsies are to the English Gorgio hawkers
and tramps. These people were, he declared, "the _real_ gypsies of
India, and just like the gypsies here. People in India called them
Trablus, which means Syrians, but they were full-blood Hindus, and not
Syrians." And here I may observe that this word Trablus which is thus
applied to Syria, is derived from Tripoli. John was very sure that his
gypsies were Indian. They had a peculiar language, consisting of words
which were not generally intelligible. "Could he remember any of these
words?" Yes. One of them was _manro_, which meant bread. Now _manro_
is all over Europe the gypsy word for bread. John Nano, who spoke
several tongues, said that he did not know it in any Indian dialect
except in that of his gypsies. These gypsies called themselves and their
language _Rom_. Rom meant in India a real gypsy. And Rom was the
general slang of the road, and it came from the Roms or Trablus. Once he
had written all his autobiography in a book. This is generally done by
intelligent Mahometans. This manuscript had unfortunately been burned by
his English wife, who told us that she had done so "because she was tired
of seeing a book lying about which she could not read."

Reader, think of losing such a life! The autobiography of an Indian
gypsy,--an abyss of adventure and darksome mysteries, illuminated, it may
be, with vivid flashes of Dacoitee, while in the distance rumbled the