y the
Rommanis say stargoli. I wonder why a snail should be a stargoli."

"I know," cried the brother, eagerly. "When you put a snail on the fire
it cries out and squeaks just like a little child. Stargoli means 'four
cries.'"

I had my doubts as to the accuracy of this startling derivation, but said
nothing. The same Gipsy on a subsequent occasion, being asked what he
would call a _roan_ horse in Rommany, replied promptly--

"A matchno grai"--a fish-horse.

"Why a matchno grai?"

"Because a fish has a roan (_i.e_., roe), hasn't it? Leastways I can't
come no nearer to it, if it ain't that."

But he did better when I was puzzling my brain, as the learned Pott and
Zippel had done before me, over the possible origin of churro or tchurro,
"a ball, or anything round," when he suggested--

"Rya--I should say that as a _churro_ is round, and a _curro_ or cup is
round, and they both sound alike and look alike, it must be all werry
much the same thing." {33}

"Can you tell me anything more about snails?" I asked, reverting to a
topic which, by the way, I have observed is like that of the hedgehog, a
favourite one with Gipsies.

"Yes; you can cure warts with the big black kind that have no shells."

"You mean slugs. I never knew they were fit to cure anything."

"Why, that's one of the things that everybody knows. When you get a wart
on your hands, you go on to the road or into the field till you find a
slug, one of the large kind with no shell (literally, with no house upon
him), and stick it on the thorn of a blackthorn in a hedge, and as the
snail dies, one day after the other, for four or five days, the wart will
die away. Many a time I've told that to Gorgios, and Gorgios have done
it, and the warts have gone away (literally, cleaned away) from their
hands." {34}

Here the Gipsy began to inquire very politely if smoking were offensive
to me; and as I assured him that it was not, he took out his pipe. And
knowing by experience that nothing is more conducive to sociability, be
it among Chippeways or Gipsies, than that smoking which is among our
Indians, literally a burnt-offering, {35} I produced a small clay pipe of
the time of Charles the Second, given to me by a gentleman who has the
amiable taste to collect such curiosities, and give them to his friends
under the express condition that they shall be smoked, and not laid away
as relics of the past. If you move in _etching_ circles, dear readers,
you