Story-telling a living Gypsy art.
A tree can never be quite dead as long as it puts forth shoots; I fancy the very latest shoot in the whole Yggdrasil of European folk-tales [lxxxi]is the episode in ‘The Tinker and his Wife’ (No. 70), where the tinker buys a barrel of beer, and says, ‘Now, my wench, you make the biggest penny out of it as ever you can,’ and she goes and sells the whole barrel to a packman for one of the old big pennies. That episode cannot be earlier than the introduction of the new bronze coinage in 1861; it looks as though it must itself be a recent coinage of Cornelius Price, or of Nebuchadnēzar, his uncle. But, there, I have known a Gypsy girl dash off what was almost a folk-tale impromptu. She had been to a pic-nic in a four-in-hand, with ‘a lot o’ real tip-top gentry’; and ‘Reía,’ she said to me afterwards, ‘I’ll tell you the comicalest thing as ever was. We’d pulled up, to put the brake on; and there was a púro hotchiwítchi (old hedgehog) come and looked at us through the hedge, looked at me hard. I could see he’d his eye upon me. And home he’d go, that old hedgehog, to his wife, and “Missus,” he’d say, “what d’ ye think? I seen a little Gypsy gal just now in a coach and four hosses”; and “Dábla!” she’d say, “sawkúmni ’as vardé kenáw” ’ (Bless us! every one now keeps a carriage).