"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.