e?"

"To _gaverit_ is to hide anything, rya. _Gaverit_." And to illustrate
its application he continued--

"They penned mandy to gaver the gry, but I nashered to keravit, an' the
mush who lelled the gry welled alangus an' dicked it."

("They told me to hide the horse, but I forgot to do it, and the man who
_owned_ the horse came by and saw it.")

It is only a few hours since I heard of a gentleman who took incredible
pains to induce the Gipsies to teach him their language, but never
succeeded. I must confess that I do not understand this. When I have
met strange Gipsies, it has often greatly grieved me to find that they
spoke their ancient tongue very imperfectly, and were ignorant of certain
Rommany words which I myself, albeit a stranger, knew very well, and
would fain teach them. But instead of accepting my instructions in a
docile spirit of ignorant humility, I have invariably found that they
were eagerly anxious to prove that they were not so ignorant as I
assumed, and in vindication of their intelligence proceeded to pour forth
dozens of words, of which I must admit many were really new to me, and
which I did not fail to remember.

The scouting, slippery night-life of the Gipsy; his familiarity with deep
ravine and lonely wood-path, moonlight and field-lairs; his use of a
secret language, and his constant habit of concealing everything from
everybody; his private superstitions, and his inordinate love of
humbugging and selling friend and foe, tend to produce in him that
goblin, elfin, boyish-mischievous, out-of-the-age state of mind which is
utterly indescribable to a prosaic modern-souled man, but which is
delightfully piquant to others. Many a time among Gipsies I have felt, I
confess with pleasure, all the subtlest spirit of fun combined with
picture-memories of Hayraddin Maugrabin--witch-legends and the
"Egyptians;" for in their ignorance they are still an unconscious race,
and do not know what the world writes about them. They are not
attractive from the outside to those who have no love for quaint
scholarship, odd humours, and rare fancies. A lady who had been in a
camp had nothing to say of them to me save that they were "dirty--dirty,
and begged." But I ever think, when I see them, of Tieck's Elves, and of
the Strange Valley, which was so grim and repulsive from without, but
which, once entered, was the gay forecourt of goblin-land.

The very fact that they hide as much as they can of their