not three Gypsies in England are acquainted. When they wish to
express those numerals in their own language, they have recourse to
very uncouth and roundabout methods, saying for seven, dui trins ta
yeck, two threes and one; for eight, dui stors, or two fours; and for
nine, desh sore but yeck, or ten all but one. Yet at one time the
English Gypsies possessed all the numerals as their Transylvanian,
Wallachian, and Russian brethren still do; even within the last fifty
years there were Gypsies who could count up to a hundred. These were
tatchey Romany, real Gypsies, of the old sacred black race, who never
slept in a house, never entered a church, and who, on their death-
beds, used to threaten their children with a curse, provided they
buried them in a churchyard. The two last of them rest, it is
believed, some six feet deep beneath the moss of a wild, hilly
heath,--called in Gypsy the Heviskey Tan, or place of holes; in
English, Mousehold,--near an ancient city, which the Gentiles call
Norwich, and the Romans the Chong Gav, or the town of the hill.

With respect to Grammar, the English Gypsy is perhaps in a worse
condition than with respect to words. Attention is seldom paid to
gender; boro rye and boro rawnie being said, though as rawnie is
feminine, bori and not boro should be employed. The proper Gypsy
plural terminations are retained in nouns, but in declension
prepositions are generally substituted for postpositions, and those
prepositions English. The proper way of conjugating verbs is seldom
or never observed, and the English method is followed. They say, I
dick, I see, instead of dico; I dick'd, I saw, instead of dikiom; if
I had dick'd, instead of dikiomis. Some of the peculiar features of
Gypsy grammar yet retained by the English Gypsies will be found noted
in the Dictionary.