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GIPSY LETTERS.
A Gipsy's Letter to his Sister .-- Drabbing Horses .-- Fortune Telling .-- Cock Shys.--"Hatch 'em pauli, or he'll lel sar the Covvas!"-- Two German Gipsy Letters.
I shall give in this chapter a few curious illustrations of Gipsy life and character, as shown in a letter, which is illustrated by two specimens in the German Rommany dialect.
With regard to the first letter, I might prefix to it, as a motto, old John Willett's remark: "What's a man without an imagination ?" Certainly it would not apply to the Gipsy, who has an imagination so lively as to be at times almost ungovernable; considering which I was much surprised that, so far as I know, the whole race has as yet produced only one writer who has distinguished himself in the department of fiction--albeit he who did so was a giant therein--I mean John Bunyan.
And here I may well be allowed an unintended digression, as to whether Bunyan were really a Gipsy.

In a previous chapter of this work, I, with little thought of Bunyan, narrated the fact that an intelligent tinker, and a full Gipsy, asked me last summer in London, if I thought that the Rommany were of the Ten Tribes of Israel?
When John Bunyan tells us explicitly that he once asked his father whether he and his relatives were of the race of the Israelites--he having then never seen a Jew--and when he carefully informs his readers that his descent was of a low and inconsiderable generation, "my father's house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families of the land," there remains no rational doubt whatever that Bunyan was indeed a Rom of the Rommany.
"_Applico_" of which, as my own special and particular Gipsy is wont to say--it is worth noting that the magician Shakespeare, who knew everything, showed himself superior to many modern dramatists in being aware that the tinkers of England had, not a peculiar cant, but a special _language_.
And now for the letters.

One day Ward'engro of the K'allis's Gav, asked me to write him a letter to his daughter, in Rommany.

So I began to write from his dictation.