a fool!' When I had got near
the door I said to her, in good German, 'The most certain way of keeping
your stove from smoking is not to light any fire in it!' and then I took
to my heels."

The history of the gipsies is still a problem. We know, indeed, that
their first bands, which were few and far between, appeared in Eastern
Europe towards the beginning of the fifteenth century. But nobody can
tell whence they started, or why they came to Europe, and, what is still
more extraordinary, no one knows how they multiplied, within a short
time, and in so prodigious a fashion, and in several countries, all
very remote from each other. The gipsies themselves have preserved no
tradition whatsoever as to their origin, and though most of them do
speak of Egypt as their original fatherland, that is only because they
have adopted a very ancient fable respecting their race.

Most of the Orientalists who have studied the gipsy language believe
that the cradle of the race was in India. It appears, in fact, that
many of the roots and grammatical forms of the _Romany_ tongue are to
be found in idioms derived from the Sanskrit. As may be imagined, the
gipsies, during their long wanderings, have adopted many foreign words.
In every _Romany_ dialect a number of Greek words appear.

At the present day the gipsies have almost as many dialects as there are
separate hordes of their race. Everywhere, they speak the language of
the country they inhabit more easily than their own idiom, which
they seldom use, except with the object of conversing freely before
strangers. A comparison of the dialect of the German gipsies with that
used by the Spanish gipsies, who have held no communication with each
other for several centuries, reveals the existence of a great number of
words common to both. But everywhere the original language is notably
affected, though in different degrees, by its contact with the more
cultivated languages into the use of which the nomads have been forced.
German in one case and Spanish in the other have so modified the
_Romany_ groundwork that it would not be possible for a gipsy from the
Black Forest to converse with one of his Andalusian brothers, although a
few sentences on each side would suffice to convince them that each was
speaking a dialect of the same language. Certain words in very frequent
use are, I believe, common to every dialect. Thus, in every vocabulary
which I have been able to consult, _pani_ means wate