II. AUSTRIAN GYPSIES IN PHILADELPHIA.

     
      It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, and I was walking down Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, when I met with three very dark men.
      Dark men are not rarities in my native city. There is, for instance, Eugene, who has the invaluable faculty of being able to turn his hand to an infinite helpfulness in the small arts. These men were darker than Eugene, but they differed from him in this, that while he is a man of color, they were not. For in America the man of Aryan blood, however dark he may be, is always “off” color, while the lightest-hued quadroon is always on it. Which is not the only paradox connected with the descendants of Africans of which I have heard.
      I saw at a glance that these dark men were much nearer to the old Aryan stock than are even my purely white readers. For they were more recently from India, and they could speak a language abounding in Hindi, in pure old Sanskrit, and in Persian. Yet they would make no display of it; on the contrary, I knew that they would be very likely at first to deny all knowledge thereof, as well as their race and blood. For they were gypsies; it was very apparent in their eyes, which had the Gitano gleam as one seldom sees it in England. I confess that I experienced a thrill as I exchanged glances with them. It was a long time since I had seen a Romany, and, as usual, I knew that I was going to astonish them. They were singularly attired, having very good clothes of a quite theatrical foreign fashion, bearing silver buttons as large as and of the shape of hen's eggs. Their hair hung in black ringlets down their shoulders, and I saw that they had come from the Austrian Slavonian land.
      I addressed the eldest in Italian. He answered fluently and politely. I changed to Ilirski or Illyrian and to Serb, of which I have a few phrases in stock. They spoke all these languages fluently, for one was a born Illyrian and one a Serb. They also spoke Nemetz, or German; in fact, everything except English.
      “Have you got through all your languages?” I at last inquired.
      “Tutte, signore,—all of them.”
      “Isn't there one left behind, which you have forgotten? Think a minute.”
      “No, signore. None.”
      “What, not one! You know so many that perhaps a language more or less makes no difference to you.”
      “By the Lord, signore, you have seen every egg in the basket.”
      I looked him fixedly in the eyes, and said, in a low tone,—
      “Ne rakesa tu Romanes miro prala?”
      There was a startled glance from one to the other, and a silence. I had asked him if he could not talk Romany. And I added,—
      “Won't you talk a word with a gypsy brother?”
      That moved them. They all shook my hands with great feeling, expressing intense joy and amazement at meeting with one who knew them.
      “Mishto hom me dikava tute.” (I am glad to see you.) So they told me how they were getting on, and where they were camped, and how they sold horses, and so on, and we might have got on much farther had it not been for a very annoying interruption. As I was talking to the gypsies, a great number of men, attracted by the sound of a foreign language, stopped, and fairly pushed themselves up to us, endeavoring to make it all out. When there were at least fifty, they crowded in between me and the foreigners, so that I could hardly talk to them. The crowd did not consist of ordinary people, or snobs. They were well dressed,—young clerks, at least,—who would have fiercely resented being told that they were impertinent.
      “Eye-talians, ain't they?” inquired one man, who was evidently zealous in pursuit of knowledge.
      “Why don't you tell us what they are sayin'?”
      “What kind of fellers air they, any way?”
      I was desirous of going with the Hungarian Roms. But to walk along Chestnut Street with an augmenting procession of fifty curious Sunday promenaders was not on my card. In fact, I had some difficulty in tearing myself from the inquisitive, questioning, well-dressed people. The gypsies bore the pressure with the serene equanimity of cosmopolite superiority, smiling at provincial rawness. Even so in China and Africa the traveler is mobbed by the many, who, there as here, think that “I want to know” is full excuse for all intrusiveness. Q'est tout comme chez nous. I confess that I was vexed, and, considering that it was in my native city, mortified.
      A few days after I went out to the tan where these Roms had camped. But the birds had flown, and a little pile of ashes and the usual debris of a gypsy camp were all that remained. The police told me that they had some very fine horses, and had gone to the Northwest; and that is all I ever saw of them.
      I have heard of a philanthropist who was turned into a misanthrope by attempting to sketch in public and in galleries. Respectable strangers, even clergymen, would stop and coolly look over his shoulder, and ask questions, and give him advice, until he could work no longer. Why is it that people who would not speak to you for life without an introduction should think that their small curiosity to see your sketches authorizes them to act as aquaintances? Or why is the pursuit of knowledge assumed among the half-bred to be an excuse for so much intrusion? “I want to know.” Well, and what if you do? The man who thinks that his desire for knowledge is an excuse for impertinence—and there are too many who act on this in all sincerity—is of the kind who knocks the fingers off statues, because “he wants them” for his collection; who chips away tombstones, and hews down historic trees, and not infrequently steals outright, and thinks that his pretense of culture is full excuse for all his mean deeds. Of this tribe is the man who cuts his name on all walls and smears it on the pyramids, to proclaim himself a fool to the world; the difference being that, instead of wanting to know anything, he wants everybody to know that His Littleness was once in a great place.
      I knew a distinguished artist, who, while in the East, only secured his best sketch of a landscape by employing fifty men to keep off the multitude. I have seen a strange fellow take a lady's sketch out of her hand, excusing himself with the remark that he was so fond of pictures. Of course my readers do not act thus. When they are passing through the Louvre or British Museum they never pause and overlook artists, despite the notices requesting them not to do so. Of course not. Yet I once knew a charming young American lady, who scouted the idea as nonsense that she should not watch artists at work. “Why, we used to make up parties for the purpose of looking at them!” she said. “It was half the fun of going there. I'm sure the artists were delighted to get a chance to talk to us.” Doubtless. And yet there are really very few artists who do not work more at their ease when not watched, and I have known some to whom such watching was misery. They are not, O intruder, painting for your amusement!
      This is not such a far cry from my Romanys as it may seem. When I think of what I have lost in this life by impertinence coming between me and gypsies, I feel that it could not be avoided. The proportion of men, even of gentlemen, or of those who dress decently, who cannot see another well-dressed man talking with a very poor one in public, without at once surmising a mystery, and endeavoring to solve it, is amazing. And they do not stop at a trifle, either.
      It is a marked characteristic of all gypsies that they are quite free from any such mean intrusiveness. Whether it is because they themselves are continually treated as curiosities, or because great knowledge of life in a small way has made them philosophers, I will not say, but it is a fact that in this respect they are invariably the politest people in the world. Perhaps their calm contempt of the galerly, or green Gorgios, is founded on a consciousness of their superiority in this matter.
      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. I have met with them exhibiting bears in Baden-Baden. These Ricinari, or bear-leaders, form, however, a set within a set, and are in fact more nearly allied to the gypsy bear-leaders of Turkey and Syria than to any other of their own people. They are wild and rude to a proverb, and generally speak a peculiar dialect of Romany, which is called the Bear-leaders' by philologists. I have also seen Syrian-gypsy Ricinari in Cairo. Many of the better caste make a great deal of money, and some are rich. Like all really pure-blooded gypsies, they have deep feelings, which are easily awakened by kindness, but especially by sympathy and interest.