Any man who wished to learn sufficient Gipsy to maintain a conversation, and thereby learn all the language, could easily have done so half a century ago from the vocabularies published by Bright and other writers.

A secret which has been for fifty years published in very practical detail in fifty books, is indeed a _secret de Ponchinelle_.
I have been asked scores of times, "Have the Gipsies an alphabet of their own?
have they grammars of their language, dictionaries, or books ?" Of course my answer was in the negative.

I have heard of vocabularies in use among crypto-Rommanies, or those who having risen from the roads live a secret life, so to speak, but I have never seen one.

But they have songs; and one day I was told that in my neighbourhood there lived a young Gipsy woman who was a poetess and made Rommany ballads.

"She can't write," said my informant; "but her husband's a _Gorgio_, and he can.