the English
'injury' with a superfluous aspirate.

On the Sunday evening after his conversation with Ursula, Borrow, moved
by his discovery of the original meaning of the gypsy word _patteran_,
falls into a strange train of thought. 'No one at present,' he says,
'knew that but myself and Ursula, who had learnt it from Mrs. Herne, the
last, it was said, of the old stock; and then I thought what strange
people the gypsies must have been in the old time. They were
sufficiently strange at present, but they must have been far stranger of
old; they must have been a more peculiar people--their language must have
been more perfect--and they must have had a greater stock of strange
secrets. I almost wished that I had lived some two or three hundred
years ago, that I might have observed these people when they were yet
stranger than at present. I wondered whether I could have introduced
myself to their company at that period, whether I should have been so
fortunate as to meet such a strange, half-malicious, half good-humoured
being as Jasper, who would have instructed me in the language, then more
deserving of note than at present. What might I not have done with that
language had I known it in its purity? Why, I might have written books
in it! Yet those who spoke it would hardly have admitted me to their
society at that period, when they kept more to themselves. Yet I thought
that I might possibly have gained their confidence, and have wandered
about with them, and learnt their language and all their strange ways,
and then--and then--and a sigh rose from the depth of my breast; for I
began to think, "Supposing I had accomplished all this, what would have
been the profit of it? and in what would all this wild gypsy dream have
terminated?"'

It is one of the ironies of fate that Borrow, neither then nor thirty
years later, when he made his pedestrian tour through Wales, should have
known that there was still in that country a gypsy tribe who _had
_preserved the language of two or three hundred years ago. He might have
met gypsies who had spoken to that Romani patriarch Abram Wood; he might
have told us the origin of the mysterious Ingrams, for one of whom he was
himself mistaken; {0z5} he might have learned from Black Ellen some of
the three hundred folk-tales with which she is credited; he might have
sat at the feet of that fairy witch Alabina the _Meleni_, or have
described 'Taw' as a girl in her teens. We may sigh fo