There is a meaningless rhyme, very common among children. It is
repeated while counting off those who are taking part in a game, and
allotting to each a place. It is as follows:—
“Ekkeri akkery u-kery an
Fillisi', follasy, Nicolas John
Queebee-quabee—Irishman.
Stingle 'em—stangle 'em—buck!”
With a very little alteration in sounds, and not more than children
make of these verses in different places, this may be read as
follows:—
“'Ekkeri, akai-ri, you kair—an.
Filissin follasy. Nakelas ja'n.
Kivi, kavi. Irishman.
Stini—stani—buck!”
This is nonsense, of course, but it is Romany, or gypsy, and may be
translated:—
“First—here—you begin.
Castle—gloves. You don't play. Go on!
Kivi—kettle. How are you?
Stini—buck—buck.”
The common version of the rhyme begins with:—
“One 'eri—two-ery, ekkeri—an.”
But one-ry is the exact translation of ekkeri; ek or yek
being one. And it is remarkable that in
“Hickory dickory dock,
The rat ran up the clock;
The clock struck one,
And down he run,
Hickory dickory dock.”
We have hickory or ekkeri again, followed by a significant one. It may be observed that while, the first verses abound in Romany
words, I can find no trace of any in other child-rhymes of the kind. It
is also clear that if we take from the fourth line the ingle 'em, angle 'em, evidently added for mere jingle, there remains
stan or stani, “a buck,” followed by the very same word in
English.
With the mournful examples of Mr. Bellenden Kerr's efforts to show
that all our old proverbs and tavern signs are Dutch, and Sir William
Betham's Etruscan-Irish, I should be justly regarded as one of the too
frequent seekers for mystery in moonshine if I declared that I
positively believed this to be Romany. Yet it is possible that it
contains gypsy words, especially “fillissi,' follasy,” which mean
exactly chateau and gloves, and I think it not improbable that
it was once a sham charm used by some Romany fortune-teller to bewilder
Gorgios. Let the reader imagine the burnt-sienna wild-cat eyed old
sorceress performing before a credulous farm-wife and her children the
great ceremony of hakk'ni panki, which Mr. Borrow calls
hokkani boro, but for which there is a far deeper name,—that of
the great secret,—which even my best friends among the Romany
tried to conceal from me. This feat is performed by inducing some woman
of largely magnified faith to believe that there is hidden in her house
a magic treasure, which can only be made to come to hand by depositing
in the cellar another treasure, to which it will come by natural
affinity and attraction. “For gold, as you sees, my deari, draws gold,
and so if you ties up all your money in a pocket-handkercher and leaves
it, you'll find it doubled. An' wasn't there the Squire's lady, and
didn't she draw two hundred old gold guineas out of the ground where
they'd laid in a old grave,—and only one guinea she gave me for all my
trouble; an' I hope you'll do better by the poor old gypsy, my deari
—- —-.”
The gold and all the spoons are tied up,—for, as the enchantress
observes, there may be silver too,—and she solemnly repeats over it
magical rhymes, while the children, standing around in awe, listen to
every word. It is a good subject for a picture. Sometimes the windows
are closed, and candles give the only light. The next day the gypsy
comes and sees how the charm is working. Could any one look under her
cloak he might find another bundle precisely resembling the one
containing the treasure. She looks at the precious deposit, repeats her
rhyme again, and departs, after carefully charging the housewife that
the bundle must not be touched or spoken of for three weeks. “Every
word you tell about it, my-deari will be a guinea gone away.” Sometimes
she exacts an oath on the Bible that nothing shall be said.
Back to the farmer's wife never again. After three weeks another
Extraordinary instance of gross credulity appears in the country paper,
and is perhaps repeated in a colossal London daily, with a reference to
the absence of the school-master. There is wailing and shame in the
house,—perhaps great suffering, for it may be that the savings of
years have beer swept away. The charm has worked.
But the little sharp-eared children remember it and sing it, and the
more meaningless it is in their ears the more mysterious does it sound.
And they never talk about the bundle, which when opened was found to
contain only sticks, stones, and rags, without repeating it. So it goes
from mouth to mouth, until, all mutilated, it passes current for even
worse nonsense than it was at first. It may be observed, however,—and
the remark will be fully substantiated by any one who knows the
language,—that there is a Romany turn to even the roughest
corners of these rhymes. Kivi, stingli, stangli,
are all gypsyish. But, as I have already intimated, this does not
appear in any other nonsense verses of the kind. There is nothing of it
in
“Intery, mintery, cutery corn”—
or in anything else in Mother Goose. It is alone in its sounds and
sense,—or nonsense. But there is not a wanderer of the roads who on
hearing it would not explain, “Rya, there's a great deal of Romanes in
that ere.”
I should also say that the word na-kelas or ne-kelas,
which I here translate differently, was once explained to me at some
length by a gypsy as signifying “not speaking,” or “keeping quiet.”
Now the mystery of mysteries of which I have spoken in the Romany
tongue is this. The hokkani boro, or great trick, consists of
three parts. Firstly, the telling of a fortune, and this is to pen
dukkerin or pen durkerin. The second part is the conveying
away of the property, which is to lel dudikabin, or to take
lightning, possibly connected with the very old English slang term of
bien lightment. There is evidently a great confusion of words here.
And the third is to “chiv o manzin apre lati,” or to put the
oath upon her, which explains itself. When all the deceived are under
oath not to utter a word about the trick, the gypsy mother has “a safe
thing of it.”
The hokkani boro, or great trick, was brought by the gypsies
from the East. It has been practiced by them all over the world, it is
still played every day somewhere. This chapter was written long ago in
England. I am now in Philadelphia, and here I read in the “Press” of
this city that a Mrs. Brown, whom I sadly and reluctantly believe is
the wife of an acquaintance of mine, who walks before the world in
other names, was arrested for the same old game of fortune-telling and
persuading a simple dame that there was treasure in the house, and all
the rest of the grand deception. And Mrs. Brown, good old Mrs. Brown,
went to prison, where she will linger until a bribed alderman, or a
purchased pardon, or some one of the numerous devices by which justice
is evaded in Pennsylvania, delivers her.
Yet it is not a good country, on the whole, for hokkani boro,
since the people here, especially in the rural districts, have a
rough-and-ready way of inflicting justice which interferes sadly with
the profits of aldermen and other politicians. Some years ago, in
Tennessee, a gypsy woman robbed a farmer by the great trick of all he
was worth. Now it is no slander to say that the rural folk of Tennessee
greatly resemble Indians in certain respects, and when I saw thousands
of them, during the war, mustered out in Nashville, I often thought, as
I studied their dark brown faces, high cheek bones, and long straight
black hair, that the American is indeed reverting to the aboriginal
type. The Tennessee farmer and his neighbors, at any rate, reverted
very strongly indeed to the original type when robbed by the gypsies,
for they turned out all together, hunted them down, and, having secured
the sorceress, burned her alive at the stake. And thus in a single
crime and its punishment we have curiously combined a world-old
Oriental offense, an European Middle-Age penalty for witchcraft, and
the fierce torture of the red Indians.