By me lay a few tools, one of which, a chisel, was broken. I took it,
went softly to the window, and looked down.

There was the wheel, including all the apparatus of a travelling tinker.
I looked to see if I could discover in the two men who stood by it any
trace of the Rommany. One, a fat, short, mind-his-own-business, ragged
son of the roads, who looked, however, as if a sturdy drinker might be
hidden in his shell, was evidently not my "affair." He seemed to be the
"Co." of the firm.

But by him, and officiating at the wheeling smithy, stood a taller
figure--the face to me invisible--which I scrutinised more nearly. And
the instant I observed his _hat_ I said to myself, "This looks like it."

For dilapidated, worn, wretched as that hat was, there was in it an
attempt, though indescribably humble, to be something melo-dramatic,
foreign, Bohemian, and poetic. It was the mere blind, dull, dead germ of
an effort--not even _life_--only the ciliary movement of an antecedent
embryo--and yet it _had_ got beyond Anglo-Saxondom. No costermonger, or
common cad, or true Englishman, ever yet had that indefinable touch of
the opera-supernumerary in the streets. It _was_ a sombrero.

"That's the man for me," I said. So I called him, and gave him the
chisel, and after a while went down. He was grinding away, and touched
his hat respectfully as I approached.

Now the reader is possibly aware that of all difficult tasks one of the
most difficult is to induce a disguised Gipsy, or even a professed one,
to utter a word of Rommany to a man not of the blood. Of this all
writers on the subject have much to say. For it is so black-swanish, I