Note 22 — INTRODUCTION

I may regret my own missed opportunities the less, as English and Welsh Gypsy folk-tales have found at length an ideal collector in my friend, Mr. John Sampson, the librarian of University College, Liverpool. No man could be better equipped for the task than he, as the nineteen stories here of his collecting will amply prove. Long a master of English Rómani, he has also during the last few years been making a profound study of the ‘deep’ Welsh dialect, the best-preserved of all the Gypsy dialects with the doubtful exception of that of the Turkish Tchinghiané. His promised work on the subject is anxiously looked for. But, more than this, he possesses the rare gift of being able to take down a story in the very words, the very accents even, of its teller. Hundreds of times have I listened to Gypsies’ talk, and in these stories of his I seem to hear it again: a phonograph could not reproduce it more faithfully. His ‘Tales in a Tent’ (Gypsy Lore Journal, April 1892, pp. 199–211) contained in a charming setting, from which, indeed, it has seemed a sin to wrench them, the three English-Gypsy stories of ‘Bobby Rag,’ ‘De Little Fox,’ and ‘De Little Bull-calf,’ given here as Nos. 51, 52, 53. They were got near Liverpool—the middle one from Wasti Gray, and the two others from her husband, Johnny Gray, who also told Mr. Sampson the story of ‘The Horse that coined Golden Guineas.’22 Then in 1896 from Matthew Wood, felling trees upon Cader Idris, and in 1897 from Cornelius Price in Lancashire, Mr. Sampson heard twenty-seven Welsh-Gypsy stories, about which he writes thus in letters:—