It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, and I was walking down Chestnut Street,
Philadelphia, when I met with three very dark men.
Dark men are not rarities in my native city. There is, for instance,
Eugene, who has the invaluable faculty of being able to turn his hand to
an infinite helpfulness in the small arts. These men were darker than
Eugene, but they differed from him in this, that while he is a man of
color, they were not. For in America the man of Aryan blood, however
dark he may be, is always "off" color, while the lightest-hued quadroon
is always on it. Which is not the only paradox connected with the
descendants of Africans of which I have heard.
I saw at a glance that these dark men were much nearer to the old Aryan
stock than are even my purely white readers. For they were more recently
from India, and they could speak a language abounding in Hindi, in pure
old Sanskrit, and in Persian. Yet they would make no display of it; on
the contrary, I knew that they would be very likely at first to deny all
knowledge thereof, as well as their race and blood. For they were
gypsies; it was very apparent in their eyes, which had the Gitano gleam
as one seldom sees it in England. I confess that I experienced a thrill
as I exchanged glances with them. It was a long time since I had seen a
Romany, and, as usual, I knew that I was going to astonish them. They
were singularly attired, having very good clothes of a quite theatrical
foreign fashion, bearing silver buttons as large as and of the shape of
hen's eggs. Their hair hung in black ringlets down their shoulders, and
I saw that they had come from the Austrian Slavonian land.
I addressed the eldest in Italian. He answered fluently and politely. I
changed to Ilirski or Illyrian and to Serb, of which I have a few phrases
in stock. They spoke all these languages fluently, for one was a born
Illyrian and one a Serb. They also spoke Nemetz, or German; in fact,
everything except English.
"Have you got through all your languages?" I at last inquired.
"Tutte, signore,--all of them."
"Isn't there _one_ left behind, which you have forgotten? Think a
minute."
"No, signore. None."
"What, not _one_! You know so many that perhaps a language more or less
makes no difference to you."
"By the Lord, signore, you have seen every egg in the basket."