ken a great interest in their language, which is now
included in "Die Sprachen Europas" as the only Indian tongue spoken in
this quarter of the world; and I believe that English Gipsy is really the
only strongly-distinct Rommany dialect which has never as yet been
illustrated by copious specimens or a vocabulary of any extent. I
therefore trust that the critical reader will make due allowances for the
very great difficulties under which I have laboured, and not blame me for
not having done better that which, so far as I can ascertain, would
possibly not have been done at all. Within the memory of man the popular
Rommany of this country was really grammatical; that which is now spoken,
and from which I gathered the material for the following pages, is, as
the reader will observe, almost entirely English as to its structure,
although it still abounds in Hindu words to a far greater extent than has
been hitherto supposed.

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY.

The Rommany of the Roads.--The Secret of Vagabond Life in England.--Its
peculiar and thoroughly hidden Nature.--Gipsy Character and the Causes
which formed it.--Moral Results of hungry Marauding.--Gipsy ideas of
Religion. The Scripture story of the Seven Whistlers.--The Baker's
Daughter.--Difficulties of acquiring Rommany.--The Fable of the Cat.--The
Chinese, the American Indian, and the Wandering Gipsy.

Although the valuable and curious works of Mr George Borrow have been in
part for more than twenty years before the British public, {1} it may
still be doubted whether many, even of our scholars, are aware of the
remarkable, social, and philological facts which are connected with an
immense proportion of our out-of-door population. There are, indeed,
very few people who know, that every time we look from the window into a
crowded street, the chances are greatly in favour of the assertion, that
we shall see at least one man who bears in his memory some hundreds of
Sanscrit roots, and that man English born; though it was probably in the
open air, and English bred, albeit his breeding was of the roads.

For go where you will, though you may not know it, you encounter at every
step, in one form or the other, _the Rommany_. True, the dwellers in
tents are becoming few and far between, because the "close cultivation"
of the present generation, which has enclosed nearly all the waste land
in England, has left no spot in many a day's journey, where "the
travellers," as