Yet he would, while I was otherwise occupied than with him, address to his favourite wooden image of a little bear on the chimneypiece, grotesque soliloquies which would have delighted a Hoffman, or conduct with it dialogues which often startled me.

With more education, he would have become a Rommany Bid- pai; and since India is the fatherland of the fable, he may have derived his peculiar faculty for turning morals and adorning tales legitimately from that source.
I may state that those stories, which were made entirely; as a few were; or in part, by my assistant and myself, were afterwards received with approbation by ordinary Gipsies as being thoroughly Rommany.

As to the _language_ of the stories, it is all literally and faithfully that of a Gipsy, word by word, written down as he uttered it, when, after we had got a _gudlo_ into shape, he told it finally over, which he invariably did with great eagerness, ending with an improvised moral.
GUDLO I.

HOW A GIPSY SAVED A CHILD'S LIFE BY BREAKING A WINDOW.
'Pre yeck divvus (or yeckorus) a Rommany chal was kairin' pyass with the koshters, an' he wussered a kosh 'pre the hev of a boro ker an' poggered it.

Welled the prastramengro and penned, "Tu must pooker (or pessur) for the glass." But when they jawed adree the ker, they lastered the kosh had mullered a divio juckal that was jawan' to dant the chavo.