Gypsy

“ The Welsh gypsy played well, and his sister touched the harp and sang, the ale circulated, and the villagers, assembling, gazed in a crowd into the hall. Then the girl danced solo, just as I have seen her sisters do in Egypt and in Russia, to her brother’s fiddling. Even so of old, Syrian and Egyptian girls haunted gardens and taverns, and danced pas seul all over the Roman empire, even unto Spain, behaving so gypsily that wise men have conjectured that they were gypsies in very truth. ”

“ I believe myself that there is something in the gypsy eye which is inexplicable, and which enables its possessor to see farther through that strange mill-stone, the human soul, than I can explain. Any one who has ever seen an old fortune-teller of “the people” keeping some simple-minded maiden by the hand, while she holds her by her glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner, with a basilisk stare, will agree with me. ”

“ And well the poor old gypsy knew that, however much he might pose as a king in his flaunting hat and gaudy jacket by day, with twilight he must make his way back to the rows of human dens that burrow into the hillside across the river Darro. ”

“ Once, with the young commercial traveler in vests and pants—three years before an officer in the Great War—we walked to lonely districts where the Indian cavalry had pitched their camps beyond the city and when in a little Turkish coffee shop, remote and solitary, some wild Gypsy women in tattered robes of many colors, through which could be seen their bare brown limbs, danced and sang. No need to ask the origin of the Gypsy folk after seeing these. They were people of the Far East, and their songs had the harsh and ancient melody of Oriental nomads. ”

“ There is a deep, strange element in the gypsy character, which finds no sympathy or knowledge in the German, and very little in other Europeans, but which is so much in accord with the Slavonian and Hungarian that he who truly feels it with love is often disposed to mingle them together. It is a dreamy mysticism; an indefinite semi-supernaturalism, often passing into gloom; a feeling as of Buddhism which has glided into Northern snows, and taken a new and darker life in winter-lands. It is strong in the Czech or Bohemian, whose nature is the worst understood in the civilized world. ”

“ The gypsy has no country, but his sentiment of nationality is strong and persistent, and his music is as peculiar as his language and customs. It is true that he steals the music of the country in which he sojourns just as readily as he steals the poultry from the roost or the linen from the line, but he always imparts to it some echo of his far Eastern home and some flavor of the tent and the hedgerow. ”

“ Good lady," exclaimed the old gypsy. "Lady find her babies; babies play—see!" (And she pretended to look into the future with some dirty cards.) "Babies play in woods. Natalie sees babies picking flowers."
Now, how could anybody ever guess that the old gypsy had just come down from picking dandelions by the lake, where she really had seen Freddie and Flossie on the island? ”

“ Or yet, again, the gypsy having obtained the plunder and substituted the dummy packet, persuades the true believer to bury it in the barn, garden, field, or a forest, performs magic ceremonies and repeats incantations over it, and cautions him to dig it up again, perhaps six months later on a certain day, it may be his saint’s or birth day, and to keep silence till then. The gypsy makes it an absolute condition—nay, he insists very earnestly on it—that the treasure shall not be dug up unless he himself is on the spot to share the spoil. ”

“ WITH THE YORKSHIRE GYPSIES
As I have said, Gypsies settled in houses now greatly outnumber their roving brethren. Hence it has come to pass that nearly every town in the land possesses a Bohemian quarter where you are met by dark faces and sidelong glances speaking of Gypsy blood. Nor can the student of Gypsy life and manners afford to neglect these haunts despite their dinginess, for as often as not they contain aged Gypsies whose memories are well worth ransacking for lore and legend, and in “working” these queer alleys, one has often picked up choice reminiscences of bygone Gypsy life. ”

“ Those who have been accustomed to consider the Gypsy as a wandering outcast, incapable of appreciating the blessings of a settled and civilised life, or—if abandoning vagabond propensities, and becoming stationary—as one who never ascends higher than the condition of a low trafficker, will be surprised to learn, that amongst the Gypsies of Moscow there are not a few who inhabit stately houses, go abroad in elegant equipages, and are behind the higher orders of the Russians neither in appearance nor mental acquirements. ”

“ It is since I have read with love and faith the evolutionists and physiologists of the most advanced type that the Unknown has become to me most wonderful, and that I have seen the light which never shone on sea or land as I never saw it before. And therefore to me the gypsy and all the races who live in freedom and near to nature are more poetic than ever. ”

“ As I have said elsewhere, the play-spirit is strong in the Gypsy, even in his latter years, and while talking with my two friends up came a comical-looking Gypsy, Charley Welch, who must have been nearer ninety than seventy, and, picking up a potato lying on the ground—the large field had grown a crop of potatoes that summer—he laughingly dropped it into Jonathan’s coat pocket. ”

“ The physical characteristics of the gypsy are easier to distinguish than to describe, and when you have seen a single one, you can readily pick out a person of that race from a thousand others. Features and expression—these above all else separate them from the natives of the countries where they are found. Their complexion is very dark, always darker than that of the peoples among whom they live. ”

“ The gypsy, returning after three days’ absence, comes with a bundle of rubbish tied up in a white handkerchief concealed under her mantle, and easily substitutes it for the one which the lady has watched for three days, and after the other is well locked up she disappears, to be heard of no more in that quarter. A trick so stupid and silly one would hardly believe could be practised once ”

“ And so some day, when all the rest of the family are in the fields, the gypsy—man or woman—comes, and entering into a conversation, leads it to the subject of the house, remarking that it is a belief among his people that in it a treasure lies buried. ”

“ A passionate folk are the Gypsies, a provoking word being at any time sufficient to call forth a blow. Even as I write these words, visions of gory fists and faces obtrude themselves through the mists of past days.
However, the Gypsies were never reported to be otherwise than polite towards the outsider who ventured into the alley. Diplomats rather than hooligans were they. “Let’s ’eave ’alf a brick at ’im,” is not the Gypsy’s way with a stranger who happens to stroll into the camp. ”

“ The gypsy settlement seemed a sort of primitive community, like those from which Tangiers and Naples must have developed into the terraced cities they are to-day. Higher up the mountains are the sacred caves where hermits once lived. ”

“ For the gypsy is parrot-like, a quaint pilferer, a rogue in grain as in green; for green was his favorite garb in olden time in England, as it is to-day in Germany, where he who breaks the Romany law may never dare on heath to wear that fatal fairy color.
These words are the key to the following book, in which I shall set forth a few sketches taken during my rambles among the Romany. The day is coming when there will be no more wild parrots nor wild wanderers, no wild nature, and certainly no gypsies. ”

“ I wandered across and found a crowd consisting mainly of Gypsies, and in order to get a better view, I climbed upon a trestle table outside a booth. In the middle of a ring of people stood two of the dark Grays, stripped to the waist, and, at a signal given by an elderly man, the combatants put up their “maulers” and the fight began. It was by no means a one-sided contest, the men being well matched with regard to weight and strength. Blow followed blow in quick succession, and at the first drawing of blood the Gypsy onlookers became excited, and the entire crowd began to surge to and fro. ”

“ We want the unpublished materials of Paspati and Kopernicki; we want Dr. von Sowa and Mr. Sampson to complete their collections; and we want, too, the Gypsy folk-tales, if such there be, of Spain, Portugal, Brazil, the Basque Country, Italy, Alsace, Germany, Scandinavia, Russia, and Greece—above all, of Africa and Asia.25 If a word like páni, water, is found in every Gypsy dialect from Persia to South America, from Finland to Egypt, one reasonably regards it as a true Rómani word, as one that the Gypsies have brought from their eastern home. ”

“ When talking of breezy commons, green woodsides, rabbits, pheasants, and the like, I have seen the eyes of a house-dwelling Gypsy grow wistful as he sighed at the visions and memories arising within him.
p. 157The sedentary Gypsies are now largely in the preponderance. Not that the tendency to settle is entirely a thing of our times. Fifty years ago, the Gypsy colony hard by my childhood’s home told of a movement not then by any means new. ”

“ Forth to the winding road under the open sky, the Gypsies are calling you. Scorning our hurrying mode of life, these folk are content to loiter beneath the green beeches, or in the shadow of some old inn on the fringe of a windy common. Like Nature herself, these wildlings of hers overflow with the play-spirit and therefore remain ever youthful. ”

“ By following these patterans, or trails, the first Gypsies on their way to Europe never lost each other, though wandering amidst horrid wildernesses and dreary denies. Rommany matters have always had a peculiar interest for me; nothing, however, connected with Gypsy life ever more captivated my imagination than this patteran system: many thanks to the Gypsies for it; it has more than once been of service to me.
* * * * *
‘Are you of the least use? Are you not spoken ill of by everybody? What’s a gypsy?’
‘What’s the bird noising yonder, brother?’
‘The bird! ”

“ At last he is passing through a Gypsy quarter,36 when he hears a boy singing: ‘his voice was beautiful as any nightingale’s.’ He looks through a door, and sees a boy, who is every whit as handsome as the prince, so he purchases this boy, and the boy plays a leading part in the story. The abject contempt in which Gypsies are held throughout the whole of south-eastern Europe renders it probable that none but a Gypsy would thus have described a member of the race. ”

“ Not far from the fountain there lived a family of bricklayers. Now, fifteen years before this time, the father in walking through the forest found a little girl, who had been deserted by the gypsies. He carried her home to his wife, and the good woman was sorry for her, and brought her up with her own sons. As she grew older, the little gypsy became much more remarkable for strength and cunning than for sense or beauty. She had a low forehead, a flat nose, thick lips, coarse hair, and a skin not golden like that of Zizi, but the colour of clay. ”

“ How often have I longed for the brush of an artist to depict the company of merry Gypsies—men, women, and bairns, horses, dogs, and donkeys, jingling pot-carts and living-wagons bedizened with new paint, starting from the top of our lane for the open country, just when the wind-rocked woods were burgeoning and every green hedge-bottom had a sprinkling of purple violets. ”

“ There are two words for fortune-telling in Gypsy, bocht and dukkering. Bocht is a Persian word, a modification of, or connected with, the Sanscrit bagya, which signifies ‘fate.’ Dukkering is the modification of a Wallaco-Sclavonian word signifying something spiritual or ghostly. In Eastern European Gypsy, the Holy Ghost is called Swentuno Ducos.
Gypsy fortune-telling is much the same everywhere, much the same in Russia as it is in Spain and in England. Everywhere there are three styles—the lofty, the familiar, and the homely ”

“ And a very poor tale it is, most clearly defective; we never, for instance, hear what becomes of the mother. Non-Gypsy versions of this story are very numerous and very widely spread, almost as widely spread [72] as the Gypsies. We have them from Iceland, Brittany, Brazil, Catalonia, Sicily, Italy, Lorraine, Germany, Tyrol, Transylvania, Hungary, Servia, Roumania, Albania, Syria, White Russia, the Caucasus, Egypt, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Bengal, as well as in Dolopathos (c. 1180) and Straparola. ”

“ But the difficulty vanishes if one may suppose that the Gypsies, starting from the Balkan Peninsula at a date when churches were familiar objects, which a pursuer would naturally pass, carried with them the modern version of the story to Russia, Spain, and the other countries in which it is told to-day. Similarly, in Gypsy stories, and in stories current in countries wide apart, one finds such incidents as the hero falling in love through a portrait, the hero playing cards with the devil, the hero carrying a Bellerophon letter, the hero looking through an all-seeing telescope. ”

“ The Hungarian gypsy differs from all his brethren of Europe in being more intensely gypsy. He has deeper, wilder, and more original feeling in music, and he is more inspired with a love of travel. Numbers of Hungarian Romany chals—in which I include all Austrian gypsies—travel annually all over Europe, but return as regularly to their own country. ”

“ For several additional Hungarian gypsy love-charms and spells, collected by Dr. Wlislocki, published in Ethnographia, and subsequently in The Gipsy-Lore Journal for June, 1890, I am greatly indebted to the kindness of Mr. D. MacRitchie:—
“The gypsy girls of Transylvania believe that spells to ‘know your future husband’ can be best carried out on the eves of certain days, such as New Year, Easter, and Saint George. ”