ld hand--one of
those aggravating fellows who are up to cryp--a man who can write a
sentence, and be capable of leaving the letter _e_ entirely out. For
there _are_ people who will do this.

So he went to work afresh upon now hypotheses, and pleasantly the hours
fled by. Quires of paper were exhausted; he worked all day and all the
evening with no result. That it was not in a foreign language my friend
was well assured.

"For well hee knows the Latine and the Dutche;
Of Fraunce and Toscanie he hath a touche."

Russian is familiar to him, and Arabic would not have been an unknown
quantity. So he began again with the next day, and had been breaking the
Sabbath until four o'clock in the afternoon, when I entered, and the
mystic advertisement was submitted to me. I glanced at it, and at once
read it into English, though as I read the smile at my friend's lost
labour vanished in a sense of sympathy for what the writer must have
suffered. It was as follows, omitting names:--

"MANDY jins of --- ---. Patsa mandy, te bitcha lav ki tu shan. Opray
minno lav, mandy'l kek pukka til tute muks a mandi. Tute's di's see
se welni poggado. Shom atrash tuti dad'l jal divio. Yov'l fordel
sor. For miduvel's kom, muk lesti shoon choomani."

In English: "I know of ---. Trust me, and send word where you are. On
my word, I will not tell till you give me leave. Your mother's heart is
wellnigh broken. I am afraid your father will go mad. He will forgive
all. For God's sake, let him know something."

This was sad enough, and the language in which it was written is good
English Rommany. I would only state in addition, that I found that in
the very house in which I was living, and at the same time, a lady had
spent three days in vainly endeavouring to ascertain the meaning of these
sentences.

It is possible that many Gipsies, be they of high or low degree, in
society or out of it, may not be pleased at my publishing a book of their
language, and revealing so much of what they fondly cherish as a secret.
They need be under no apprehension, since I doubt very much whether, even
with its aid, a dozen persons living will seriously undertake to study
it--and of this dozen there is not one who will not be a philologist; and
such students are generally aware that there are copious vocabularies of
all the other Gipsy dialects of Europe easy to obtain from any
bookseller. Had my friend used the works of Pott or