I had, as I had said in my dialogue with Ursula, been very eager to learn the word for leaf in the Romanian language, but had never learned it till this day; so patteran signified leaf, the leaf of a tree; and no one at present knew that but myself and Ursula, who had learned it from Mrs.Herne, the last, it was said, of the old stock; and then I thought what strange people the gypsies must have been in the old time.

They were sufficiently strange at present, but they must have been far stranger of old; they must have been a more peculiar people--their language must have been more perfect--and they must have had a greater stock of strange secrets.

I almost wished that I had lived some two or three hundred years ago, that I might have observed these people when they were yet stranger than at present.

I wondered whether I could have introduced myself to their company at that period, whether I should have been so fortunate as to meet such a strange, half-malicious, half good-humoured being as Jasper, who would have instructed me in the language, then more deserving of note than at present.

What might I not have done with that language, had I known it in its purity?
Why, I might have written books in it; yet those who spoke it would hardly have admitted me to their society at that period, when they kept more to themselves.