he tinker, gravely. Not
a muscle of his face moved.

"The _coals_," I added, "are _hangars_ or _wongurs_, sometimes called
_kaulos_."

"Never heerd the words before in my life," quoth the sedate tinker.

"The bellows is a _pudemengro_. Some call it a _pishota_."

"Wery fine language, sir, is French," rejoined the tinker. In every
instance he repeated the words after me, and pronounced them correctly,
which I had not invariably done. "Wery fine language. But it's quite
new to me."

"You wouldn't think now," I said, affably, "that _I_ had ever been on the
roads!"

The tinker looked at me from my hat to my boots, and solemnly replied--

"I should say it was wery likely. From your language, sir, wery likely
indeed."

I gazed as gravely back as if I had not been at that instant the worst
sold man in London, and asked--

"Can you _rakher Rommanis_?" (_i.e_., speak Gipsy.)

And _he_ said he _could_.

Then we conversed. He spoke English intermingled with Gipsy, stopping
from time to time to explain to his assistant, or to teach him a word.
This portly person appeared to be about as well up in the English Gipsy
as myself--that is, he knew it quite as imperfectly. I learned that the
master had been in America, and made New York and Brooklyn glad by his
presence, while Philadelphia, my native city had been benefited as to its
scissors and morals by him.

"And as I suppose you made money there, why didn't you remain?" I
inquired.

The Gipsy--for he was really a Gipsy, and not a half-scrag--looked at me
wistfully, and apparently a little surprised that I should ask him such a
question.

"Why, sir, _you_ know that _we_ can't keep still. Somethin' kept telling
me to move on, and keep a movin'. Some day I'll go back again."

Suddenly--I suppose because a doubt of my perfect Freemasonry had been
aroused by my absurd question--he said, holding up a kettle--

"What do you call this here in Rommanis?"

"I call it a _kekavi_ or a _kavi_," I said. "But it isn't _right_
Rommany. It's Greek, which the Rommanichals picked up on their way
here."

And here I would remark, by the way, that I have seldom spoken to a Gipsy
in England who did not try me on the word for kettle.

"And what do you call a face?" he added.

"I call a face a _mui_," I said, "and a nose a _nak_; and as for _mui_, I
call _rikker tiro mui_, 'hold your jaw.' That is German Rommany."

The tinker gazed at me admiringly, and then said, "Yo