house on every round, that is good for a cold The hieroglyphics that are used are: tatur.' X NO GOOD; too poor, and know too much. STOP, if you have what they want, they will buy. They are GO IN THIS DIRECTION, it is better than the other road. BONE (good). Safe for a "cold tatur," if for nothing else. COOPER'D (spoilt), by too many tramps calling there. GAMMY (unfavourable), likely to have you taken up. FLUMMUXED (dangerous), sure of a month in quod (prison). RELIGIOUS, but tidy on the whole. Where did these signs come from, and when were they first used? are questions which I have asked myself again and again, whilst endeavouring to discover their history. Knowing the character of the Gipsies, and ascertaining from a tramp that they are well acquainted with the hieroglyphics, "and have been as long ago as ever he could remember," I have little hesitation in ascribing the invention to them. And strange it would be if some modern Belzoni, or Champollion, discovered in these beggars' marks fragments of ancient Egyp * Mayhew, vol. 1, p. 218. tian or Hindoo hieroglyphical writing! But this, of course, is a simple vagary of the imagination. That the Gipsies were in the habit of leaving memorials of the road they had taken, and the successes that had befallen them, there can be no doubt. In an old book, The Triumph of Wit, 1724, there is a passage which appears to have been copied from some older work, and it runs thus-"The Gipsies set out twice a year, and scatter all over England, each parcel having their appointed stages, that they may not interfere, nor hinder each other; and for that purpose, when they set forward in the country, they stick up boughs in the way of divers kinds, according as it is agreed among them, that one company may know which way another is gone, and so take a different road." The works of Hoyland and Borrow supply other instances. I cannot close this subject without drawing attention to the extraordinary fact, that actually on the threshold of the gallows the sign of the vagabond is be met with! "The murderer's signal is even exhibited from the gallows; as a red handkerchief held in the hand of the felon about to be THE MURDERER'S SIGNAL ON THE GALLOWs. xlvii executed is a token that he dies without having betrayed any professional secrets.” * As this sheet is passing through the press, a clergyman writes from Great Yarmouth to say that only a short time since, when residing in Norwich, he used frequently to see beggars' marks on the houses, and street corners. * Mr. Rawlinson's Report to the General Board of Health,Parish of Havant, Hampshire. THE HISTORY OF SLANG, OR THE VULGAR LANGUAGE OF FAST LIFE. SLANG is the language of street humour, of fast, high, and low life. CANT, as was stated in the chapter upon that subject, is the vulgar language of secrecy. They are both universal and ancient, and appear to have been the peculiar concomitants of gay, vulgar, or worthless persons in every part of the world, at every period of time. Indeed, if we are to believe implicitly the saying of the wise man, that "there is nothing new under the sun," the "fast" men of buried Nineveh, with their knotty and door-matty looking beards, may have cracked slang jokes on the steps of Sennacherib's palace; and the stocks and stones of Ancient Egypt, and the bricks of venerable and used-up Babylon, may, for aught we know, be covered with slang hieroglyphics unknown to f |