the

simple feeling of nature with romance.  During the Middle Ages thousands of such links and symbols united nature with religion.  Thus Conrad von Würtzburg tells in his “Goldene Schmiede” that the parrot which shines in fairest grass-green hue, and yet like common grass is never wet, sets forth the Virgin, who bestowed on man an endless spring, and yet remained unchanged.  So the parrot and grass and green and shimmering light all blended in the ideal of the immortal Maid-Mother, and so the bird appears in pictures by Van Eyck and Dürer.  To me the gypsy-parrot and green grass in lonely lanes and the rain and sunshine all mingle to set forth the inexpressible purity and sweetness of the virgin parent, Nature.  For the gypsy is parrot-like, a quaint pilferer, a rogue in grain as in green; for green was his favorite garb in olden time in England, as it is to-day in Germany, where he who breaks the Romany law may never dare on heath to wear that fatal fairy color.

These words are the key to the following book, in which I shall set forth a few sketches taken during my rambles among the Romany.  The day is coming when there will be no more wild parrots nor wild wanderers, no wild nature, and certainly no gypsies.  Within a very few years in the city of Philadelphia, the English sparrow, the very cit and cad of birds, has driven from the gardens all the wild, beautiful feathered creatures whom, as a boy, I knew.  The fire-flashing scarlet tanager and the humming-bird, the yellow-bird, blue-bird, and golden oriole, are now almost forgotten, or unknown to city children.  So the people of self-conscious culture and the mart and factory are banishing the wilder sort, and it

is all right, and so it must be, and therewith basta.  But as a London reviewer said when I asserted in a book that the child was perhaps born who would see the last gypsy, “Somehow we feel sorry for that child.”

THE RUSSIAN GYPSIES.

It is, I believe, seldom observed that the world is so far from having quitted the romantic or sentimental for the purely scientific that, even in science itself, whatever is best set forth owes half its charm to something delicately and distantly reflected from the forbidden land of fancy.  The greatest reasoners and writers on the driest topics are still “genial,” because no man ever yet had true genius who did not feel the inspiration of poetry, or mystery, or at least of the unusual.  We are not rid of the marvelous or curious, and, if we have not yet a science of curiosities, it is apparently because it lies for the present distributed about among the other sciences, just as in small museums illuminated manuscripts are to be found in happy family union with stuffed birds or minerals, and with watches and snuff-boxes, once the property of their late majesties the Georges.  Until such a science is formed, the new one of ethnology may appropriately serve for it, since it of all presents most attraction to him who is politely called the general reader, but who should in truth be called the man who reads the most for mere amusement.  For Ethnology deals with such delightful material as primeval kumbo-cephalic skulls, and appears to her votaries arrayed, not in silk attire, but in strange fragments

of leather from ancient Irish graves, or in cloth from Lacustrine villages.  She glitters with the quaint jewelry of the first Italian race, whose ghosts, if they wail over the “find,” “speak in a language man knows no more.”  She charms us with etchings or scratchings of mammoths on mammoth-bone, and invites us to explore mysterious caves, to picnic among megalithic monuments, and speculate on pictured Scottish stones.  In short, she engages man to investigate his ancestry, a pursuit which presents charms even to the illiterate, and asks us to find out facts concerning works of art which have interested everybody in every age.

Ad interim, before the science of curiosities is segregated from that of ethnology, I may observe that one of the marvels in the latter is that, among all the subdivisions of the human race, there are only two which have been, apparently from their beginning, set apart, marked and cosmopolite, ever living among others, and yet reserved unto themselves.  These are the Jew and the gypsy.  From time whereof history hath naught to the contrary, the Jew was, as he himself holds in simple faith, the first man.  Red Earth, Adam, was a Jew, and the old claim to be a peculiar people has been curiously confirmed by the extraordinary genius and influence of the race, and by their boundless wanderings.  Go where we may, we find the Jew—has any other wandered so far?

Yes, one.  For wherever Jew has gone, there, too, we find the gypsy.  The Jew may be more ancient, but even the authentic origin of the Romany is lost in ancient Aryan record, and, strictly speaking, his is a prehistoric caste.  Among the hundred and fifty wandering

tribes of India and Persia, some of them Turanian, some Aryan, and others mixed, it is of course difficult to identify the exact origin of the European gypsy.  One thing we know: that from the tenth to the twelfth century, and probably much later on, India threw out from her northern half a vast multitude of very troublesome indwellers.  What with Buddhist, Brahman, and Mohammedan wars,—invaders outlawing invaded,—the number of out-castes became alarmingly great.  To these the Jats, who, according to Captain Burton, constituted the main stock of our gypsies, contributed perhaps half their entire nation.  Excommunication among the Indian professors of transcendental benevolence meant social death and inconceivable cruelty.  Now there are many historical indications that these outcasts, before leaving India, became gypsies, which was the most natural thing in a country where such classes had already existed in very great numbers from early times.  And from one of the lowest castes, which still exists in India, and is known as the Dom, [19] the emigrants to the West probably derived their name and several characteristics.  The Dom burns the dead, handles corpses, skins beasts, and performs other functions, all of which were appropriated by, and became peculiar to, gypsies in several countries in Europe, notably in Denmark and Holland, for several centuries after their arrival there.  The Dom

of the present day also sells baskets, and wanders with a tent; he is altogether gypsy.  It is remarkable that he, living in a hot climate, drinks ardent spirits to excess, being by no means a “temperate Hindoo,” and that even in extreme old age his hair seldom turns white, which is a noted peculiarity among our own gypsies of pure blood.  I know and have often seen a gypsy woman, nearly a hundred years old, whose curling hair is black, or hardly perceptibly changed.  It is extremely probable that the Dom, mentioned as a caste even in the Shastras, gave the name to the Rom.  The Dom calls his wife a Domni, and being a Dom is “Domnipana.”  In English gypsy, the same words are expressed by Rom, romni, and romnipen.  D, be it observed, very often changes to r in its transfer from Hindoo to Romany.  Thus doi, “a wooden spoon,” becomes in gypsy roi, a term known to every tinker in London.  But,