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The Patteran, or Gipsies' Road- Mark . The Christian Cross, named by Continental Gipsies Trushul, after the Trident of Siva. Curious English-Gipsy term for the Cross. Ashwood Fires on Christmas Day. Our Saviour regarded with affection by the Rommany because he was like themselves and poor. Strange ideas of the Bible. The Oak. Lizards renew their lives. Snails. Slugs.
"I've always thought of it as patter, or patois, the Gypsy patois, and somehow it strikes me as absurd to follow a language over the world a sort of philological excursion." "In a way the patteran is speech," he answered. "But it always says one thing: 'This way I have passed. Two sprigs, crossed in certain ways and left upon the trail, compose the patteran.
The only man with right to say whether or not a woman shall be thrashed is her owner. Once that right is established " * Patteran, a gipsy word: trail. "Touch her and I'll break your neck!" warned Will, without undue emotion, but truthfully beyond a shadow of a doubt.
So I explains the patteran to him, and shows him ours with two bits of hawthorn laid crosswise, for I does not regard him as a stranger, and I sees that he can keep his lips shut when it is required. "He was practising the patteran at my feet, when I hears the cry of 'Christian! and I cannot explain to you the chill that came over my heart at the sound.
I had, as I had said in my dialogue with Ursula, been very eager to learn the word for leaf in the Romanian language, but had never learnt it till this day; so patteran signified leaf of a tree; and no one at present knew that but myself and Ursula, who had learnt it from Mrs.
It is very possible that the reader during his country walks or rides has observed, on coming to four cross-roads, two or three handfuls of grass lying at a small distance from each other down one of these roads; perhaps he may have supposed that this grass was recently plucked from the roadside by frolicsome children, and flung upon the ground in sport, and this may possibly have been the case; it is ten chances to one, however, that no children's hands plucked them, but that they were strewed in this manner by Gypsies, for the purpose of informing any of their companions, who might be straggling behind, the route which they had taken; this is one form of the patteran or trail.
The amount of this fiery and head-splitting liquor which the two old men thus got away with was afterward gleefully recounted in the wagons and fearfully whispered of in the little Dutch church at Horse's Neck which the Jacobuses had attended for over a hundred years. But never, as wagon after wagon had gone up the turning that led to the upward farm, had there been a patteran pointing that way.
"Here, let us try this together," Graham said abruptly, placing the song on the rack before her. "Oh, but it's the 'Gypsy Trail," she protested. "It will only make my mood worse." And she hummed: "'Follow the Romany patteran West to the sinking sun, Till the junk sails lift through the homeless drift, And the East and the West are one. "What is the Romany patteran?" she broke off to ask.
"And now, because I know you don't know, I'll tell you what a patteran is," she was saying.... "Dick, boy, your position is distinctly Carlylean," Terrence McFane said in fatherly tones. The sages of the madrono grove were at table, and, with Paula, Dick and Graham, made up the dinner party of seven. "Mere naming of one's position does not settle it, Terrence," Dick replied.
All that he had been able to think of was that he must get to her at once, follow the patteran at top speed. He had done so and now unhappily remembered a dozen neglected people who must wonder at his extraordinary disappearance. But he only smiled joyously. He had another engagement.
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