ngrender pene aper mande,
buten tschingerde buten trinen marde te man, tshimaster apri butin
tshidde. O bolloben te rackel tutt andre sawe kolester, kai me wium adre
te me tshawa tiro rum shin andro meraben.

TRANSLATION.

MY DEAR WIFE,--Before I came to Frankfort I went to Neustadt. On the way
it did not go well with me. Our men quarrelled together. It was cold
and wet weather. The children were ill. That house into which we had
gone burnt down; our kid and the young calf run away. The flax and hemp
and wool [which] the sister-in-law and step-daughter spun are also
burned. In short, I say I became so poor that we all went naked. I
thought of cutting wood and working by hand, or I should go into business
and sell something. I think I will make my living so. I was so treated
by the soldiers. They fell on us, wounded many, three they killed, and I
was taken to prison to work for life. Heaven preserve you in all things
from that into which I have fallen, and I remain thy husband unto death.

* * * * *

It is the same sad story in all, wretchedness, poverty, losses, and
hunger. In the English letter there was a _chingari_--a shindy; in the
German they have a _tshinger_, which is nearly the same word, and means
the same. It may be remarked as curious that the word _meraben_ at the
end of the letter, meaning death, is used by English Gipsies to signify
life as well.

"Dick at the gorgios,
The gorgios round mandy;
Trying to take my meripon,
My meripon away."

The third letter is also in the German-Gipsy dialect, and requires a
little explanation. Once a man named Charles Augustus was arrested as a
beggar and suspected Gipsy, and brought before Mr Richard Liebich, who
appears to have been nothing less in the total than the _Furstlich Reuss-
Plauenschem Criminalrathe und Vorstande des Furstlichen Criminalgerichts
zu Lobenstein_--in fact, a rather lofty local magistrate. Before this
terrible title Charles appeared, and swore stoutly that he was no more a
Rommany chal than he was one of the Apostles--for be it remembered,
reader, that in Germany at the present day, the mere fact of being a
Gipsy is still treated as a crime. Suddenly the judge attacked him with
the words--"_Tu hal rom, me hom, rakker tschatschopenn_!"--"Thou art a
Gipsy, I am a Gipsy, speak the truth." And Charles, looking up in
amazement and seeing the black hair and brown face of the judge, verily
believed that