ridge, been _aficionado_,
or smitten, with gypsies, and made a manuscript vocabulary of Romany
words, which he allowed me to use, and from which I obtained several
which were new to me. This fact should make all smart gypsy scholars
"take tent" and heed as to believing that they know everything. I have
many Anglo-Romany words--purely Hindi as to origin--which I have verified
again and again, yet which have never appeared in print. Thus far the
Romany vocabulary field has been merely scratched over.

Who that knows London knoweth not Sir Patrick Colquhoun? I made his
acquaintance in 1848, when, coming over from student-life in Paris and
the Revolution, I was most kindly treated by his family. A glorious,
tough, widely experienced man he was even in early youth. For then he
already bore the enviable reputation of being the first amateur sculler
on the Thames, the first gentleman light-weight boxer in England, a
graduate with honors of Cambridge, a Doctor Ph. of Heidelberg, a
diplomat, and a linguist who knew Arabic, Persian, and Gaelic, Modern
Greek and the Omnium Botherum tongues. They don't make such men
nowadays, or, if they do, they leave out the genial element.

Years had passed, and I had returned to London in 1870, and found Sir
Patrick living, as of yore, in the Temple, where I once and yet again and
again dined with him. It was in the early days of this new spring of
English life that we found ourselves by chance at a boat-race on the
Thames. It was on the Thames, by his invitation, that I had twenty years
before first seen an English regatta, and had a place in the gayly
decked, superbly luncheoned barge of his club. It is a curious point in
English character that the cleverest people do not realize or understand
how festive and genial they really are, or how gayly and picturesquely
they conduct their sports. It is a generally accepted doctrine with them
that they do this kind of thing better in France; they believe sincerely
that they take their own amusements sadly; it is the tone, the style,
with the wearily-witty, dreary clowns of the weekly press, in their
watery imitations of Thackeray's worst, to ridicule all English festivity
and merry-making, as though sunshine had faded out of life, and God and
Nature were dead, and in their place a great wind-bag Jesuit-Mallock were
crying, in tones tainted with sulphuretted hydrogen, "_Ah bah_!" Reader
mine, I have seen many a fete in my time, all the way