ut down in
dictionaries, owing to their provincial character. I have found, on
questioning a Persian gentleman, that he knew the meaning of many Rommany
words from their resemblance to vulgar Persian, though they were not in
the Persian dictionary which I used.

ROMMANI GUDLI; OR, GIPSY STORIES AND FABLES.

The Gipsy to whom I was chiefly indebted for the material of this book
frequently narrated to me the _Gudli_ or small stories current among his
people, and being a man of active, though child-like imagination, often
invented others of a similar character. Sometimes an incident or saying
would suggest to me the outline of a narrative, upon which he would
eagerly take it up, and readily complete the tale. But if I helped him
sometimes to evolve from a hint, a phrase, or a fact, something like a
picture, it was always the Gipsy who gave it Rommany characteristics and
conferred colour. It was often very difficult for him to distinctly
recall an old story or clearly develop anything of the kind, whether it
involved an effort of memory or of the imagination, and here he required
aid. I have never in my life met with any man whose mind combined so
much simplicity, cunning, and grotesque fancy, with such an entire
incapacity to appreciate either humour or "poetry" as expressed in the
ordinary language of culture. The metre and rhyme of the simplest ballad
made it unintelligible to him, and I was obliged to repeat such poetry
several times before he could comprehend it. Yet he would, while I was
otherwise occupied than with him, address to his favourite wooden image
of a little bear on the chimneypiece, grotesque soliloquies which would
have delighted a Hoffman, or conduct with it dialogues which often
startled me. With more education, he would have become a Rommany Bid-
pai; and since India is the fatherland of the fable, he may have derived
his peculiar faculty for turning morals and adorning tales legitimately
from that source.

I may state that those stories, which were made entirely; as a few were;
or in part, by my assistant and myself, were afterwards received with
approbation by ordinary Gipsies as being thoroughly Rommany. As to the
_language_ of the stories, it is all literally and faithfully that of a
Gipsy, word by word, written down as he uttered it, when, after we had
got a _gudlo_ into shape, he told it finally over, which he invariably
did with great eagerness, ending with an improvised mora