mation, adding that if we would kindly lend her a sovereign it
should be faithfully repaid in the morning.

The professor burst out laughing. But the fern-collector gazed at her in
wrath and amazement.

"I say, old woman," he cried; "do you know who you're _rakkerin_
[speaking] to? This here gentleman is one of the deepest Romany ryes
[gypsy gentlemen] a-going. And that there one could _gladdher_ you out
of your eye-teeth."

She gave one look of dismay,--I shall never forget that look,--and ran
away. The witch had chanced upon Arbaces. I think that the tramp had
been in his time a man in better position. He was possibly a lawyer's
clerk who had fallen into evil ways. He spoke English correctly when not
addressing the beggar woman. There was in Aberystwith at the same time
another fern-seller, an elderly man, as wretched and as ragged a creature
as I ever met. Yet he also spoke English purely, and could give in Latin
the names of all the plants which he sold. I have always supposed that
the tinkers' language spoken of by Shakespeare was Romany; but I now
incline to think it may have been Shelta.

Time passed, and "the levis grene" had fallen thrice from the trees, and
I had crossed the sea and was in my native city of Philadelphia. It was
a great change after eleven years of Europe, during ten of which I had
"homed," as gypsies say, in England. The houses and the roads were
old-new to me; there was something familiar-foreign in the voices and
ways of those who had been my earliest friends; the very air as it blew
hummed tunes which had lost tones in them that made me marvel. Yet even
here I soon found traces of something which is the same all the world
over, which goes ever on "as of ever," and that was the wanderer of the
road. Near the city are three distinct gypsyries, where in summer-time
the wagon and the tent may be found; and ever and anon, in my walks about
town, I found interesting varieties of vagabonds from every part of
Europe. Italians of the most Bohemian type, who once had been like
angels,--and truly only in this, that their visits of old were few and
far between,--now swarmed as fruit dealers and boot-blacks in every lane;
Germans were of course at home; Czechs, or Slavs, supposed to be Germans,
gave unlimited facilities for Slavonian practice; while tinkers, almost
unknown in 1860, had in 1880 become marvelously common, and strange to
say were nearly all Austrians of different kinds.