88 GYPSIES. 



and Siebenbiirgen, and were Gfypsies ever fair, blue-grey- 

 eyed like me. And a very stylish party of young ladies 

 and gentlemen at a neighboring table leveled their 

 glasses and lorgnettes at me and wondered what the long, 

 lanky, fair faced northerner could have in common with, 

 ihe short, dark-haired, almost black Hungarians. 



But the Gypsy band were business men and their 

 business was to play and the management could not al- 

 low them to spend the night talking to a newly found 

 Yankee brother, so they had to strike up, and I departed 

 and in the confused, hurried sight-seeing of my week at 

 the fair, I saw them no more. And now I know you are 

 asking where and how I learned the language the Hun- 

 garian Gfypsies spoke. You knew there were Gypsies in 

 Hungary, you knew they were musicians, perhaps you 

 have some of you heard them yourselves in Vienna or 

 Paris, or even in New York where for several years there 

 has been a band at the Eden Musee and where another 

 band, with which I was acquainted, played all the sum- 

 mer of 1892 in the Park Avenue Hotel. But who, you 

 would like to know, taught me their language ? Of 

 course I learned it from some rare volume on East Euro- 

 pean dialects, or something of that sort. No, you are 

 wrong. My instructors in the language which Gypsies 

 talk to-day on the banks of the Danube were the Gypsies 

 you have all seen who pass through Poughkeepsie and 

 tent in Dutchess County every summer, who themselves 

 or their ancestors came to this country from England, 

 and whose people have lived in English speaking lands 

 for four hundred years since their progenitors entered 

 England from France and the Low countries. 



Yet still to this day the Gypsies right here in Dutchess 

 County speak the same language (of course with im- 

 portant dialectic variation) which Gypsies speak in 

 Spain, Hungary or Turkey, and still they show the same 



or similar physical characteristics, traditions and cus- 



2e . 



