will at once know to whom I refer.

The quick eye of the Gipsy at once observed my pipe.

"That is a _crow-swagler_--a crow-pipe," he remarked.

"Why a crow-pipe?"

"I don't know. Some Gipsies call 'em _mullos' swaglers_, or dead men's
pipes, because those who made 'em were dead long ago. There are places
in England where you can find 'em by dozens in the fields. I never
dicked (saw) one with so long a stem to it as yours. And they're old,
very old. What is it you call it before everything" (here he seemed
puzzled for a word) "when the world was a-making?"

"The Creation."

"Avali--that's it, the Creation. Well, them crow-swaglers was kaired at
the same time; they're hundreds--avali--thousands of beshes (years) old.
And sometimes we call the beng (devil) a swagler, or we calls a swagler
the beng."

"Why?"

"Because the devil lives in smoke."

CHAPTER III. THE GIPSY TINKER.

Difficulty of coming to an Understanding with Gipsies.--The
Cabman.--Rommany for French.--"Wanderlust."--Gipsy Politeness.--The
Tinker and the Painting.--Secrets of Bat-catching.--The Piper of Hamelin,
and the Tinker's Opinion of the Story.--The Walloon Tinker of Spa.--Argot.

One summer day in London, in 1871, I was seated alone in an artist's
studio. Suddenly I heard without, beneath the window, the murmur of two
voices, and the sleepy, hissing, grating sound of a scissors-grinder's
wheel.

By me lay a few tools, one of which, a chisel, was broken. I took it,
went softly to the window, and looked down.

There was the wheel, including all the apparatus of a travelling tinker.
I looked to see if I could discover in the two men who stood by it any
trace of the Rommany. One, a fat, short, mind-his-own-business, ragged
son of the roads, who looked, however, as if a sturdy drinker might be
hidden in his shell, was evidently not my "affair." He seemed to be the
"Co." of the firm.

But by him, and officiating at the wheeling smithy, stood a taller
figure--the face to me invisible--which I scrutinised more nearly. And
the instant I observed his _hat_ I said to myself, "This looks like it."

For dilapidated, worn, wretched as that hat was, there was in it an
attempt, though indescribably humble, to be something melo-dramatic,
foreign, Bohemian, and poetic. It was the mere blind, dull, dead germ of
an effort--not even _life_--only the ciliary movement of an antecedent
embryo--and yet it _had_ got beyond Anglo-Saxondom.