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"Got all the strokes. I always said it, Master Joe. Only wants the strength." Joe took Mike by the shoulder, and walked him off in the direction of a man in a Zingari blazer who was bowling slows to another of the M.C.C. team. Mike recognised him with awe as one of the three best amateur wicket-keepers in the country. "What do you think of this?" said Joe, exhibiting Mike, who grinned bashfully.
As the sun showed his first up-slanting rays above the horizon, with the morning star hanging impertinently near, the two gipsy encampments began to exhibit signs of life. The Zingari encamp exclusively by themselves, and some picturesque specimens of the male sex, looking remarkably like the lively photograph of the Greek brigands, showed themselves on the outskirts.
Over mountain and sea, and through dark forests with legends of streghe and Zingari, these semi-outlaws of society, the Neapolitan and Rommany, recognised each other intuitively. The handsomest young gentleman in England could not have interested these handsome young sinners as the dark-brown, grey-haired old vagabond did. Their eyes stole to him.
The Bushmen of the north, who were even more savage and brutal, then came down, and were with difficulty repulsed from the walled cities. In ordinary times we see very little of them. They are the thieves, the human vermin of the woods. Under the name of gipsies, those who are now often called Romany and Zingari were well known to the ancients.
And very often above the ring and clamour of our hammers would rise the wonder of her voice singing some wild air of the Zingari or plaintive old ballad; so often and so gloriously she sang that at last, as I blew the fire for another heat, Jeremy bade me hush, and silent thus we stood to hearken.
"I trust to you not to give the show away." There was a gleam in his eye that I knew well enough elsewhere, but was unprepared for in those healthy, sane surroundings; and it was with very definite misgivings and surmises that I followed the Zingari blazer through the vast flower-bed of hats and bonnets that bloomed beneath the ladies' awning.
Just as the reading of the proclamation by the head of the police came to an end, an idea darted instinctively into the mind of Michael Strogoff. "What a singular coincidence," thought he, "between this proclamation expelling all foreigners of Asiatic origin, and the words exchanged last evening between those two gipsies of the Zingari race.
The wicked gipsy had resolved, if she could catch her, to stop her cries one way or another; to take her in her arms, hold her hand over her mouth, and to run with her to some place in the hills, not far off, some cave or hole known only to herself and her own people; and if the poor child had once been brought there, she would never have been suffered to go free again among her friends to tell where the zingari hole was.
"She's a-doin' her hair!" whispered Jerry. "She allus used to sing in the morning a-doin' her hair, I mind, but never ah, never so wonderfully!" And then she began again, this time that Zingari air we both remembered so well. "Jerry!" she cried. "My dear, good Jerry!" But the Tinker drew back, a little abashed by the wondrous change in her. "Why, Ann why, Anna!" he stammered.
The chalk-mark on the bottles was intended to be cabalistically private, but an acquaintance with the occult dialect of Spanish Zingari convinced you that 1/2, meant nothing else than that the bottles represented twelve and a half cents each, with three years interest, a fabulous sum, but lavished in a direction where the pledge of a dukedom had not been irrational, if the object could not have been otherwise accomplished.
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