hary in teaching
me any.'

'They were vary sherry to me too,' said the Hungarian, speaking in broken
English; 'I only could learn from them half a dozen words, for example,
gul eray, {250a} which, in the czigany of my country, means sweet
gentleman; or edes ur in my own Magyar.'

'Gudlo Rye, in the Romany of mine, means a sugar'd gentleman,' said I;
'then there are gypsies in your country?'

'Plenty,' said the Hungarian, speaking German, 'and in Russia and Turkey
too; and wherever they are found, they are alike in their ways and
language. Oh, they are a strange race, and how little known! I know
little of them, but enough to say, that one horse-load of nonsense has
been written about them; there is one Valter Scott--'

'Mind what you say about him,' said I; 'he is our grand authority in
matters of philology and history.'

'A pretty philologist,' said the Hungarian, 'who makes the gypsies speak
Roth-Welsch, {250b} the dialect of thieves; a pretty historian, who
couples together Thor and Tzernebock.'

'Where does he do that?' said I.

'In his conceited romance of Ivanhoe he couples Thor and Tzernebock
together, and calls them gods of the heathen Saxons.'

'Well,' said I, 'Thur or Thor was certainly a god of the heathen Saxons.'

'True,' said the Hungarian; 'but why couple him with Tzernebock?
Tzernebock was a word which your Valter had picked up somewhere without
knowing the meaning. Tzernebock was no god of the Saxons, but one of the
gods of the Sclaves, on the southern side of the Baltic. The Sclaves had
two grand gods to whom they sacrificed, Tzernebock and Bielebock; that
is, the black and white gods, who represented the powers of dark and
light. They were overturned by Waldemar, the Dane, the great enemy of
the Sclaves; the account of whose wars you will find in one fine old
book, written by Saxo Gramaticus, which I read in the library of the
college of Debreczen. The Sclaves, at one time, were masters of all the
southern shore of the Baltic, where their descendants are still to be
found, though they have lost their language, and call themselves Germans;
but the word Zernevitz near Dantzic, still attests that the Sclavic
language was once common in those parts. Zernevitz means the thing of
blackness, as Tzernebock means the god of blackness. Prussia itself
merely means, in Sclavish, Lower Russia. There is scarcely a race or
language in the world more extended than the Sclavic. On the other side
o