WALKING across the country one breezy November day, I was attracted by the sight of a gipsy tent, pitched on a piece of waste common, some hundred yards off my path. This was motive enough for me to change my direction, and approach the little settlement; for these wandering caravans have always had a peculiar fascination for me, and I rarely pass them by without closer investigation.

This particular establishment Iwas of the very poorest and most abject description. One miserable tent, riddled with holes, and patched with many-coloured rags, was propped up against a neighbouring bank. A half-starved donkey, laden with some ragged blankets, was standing immovable alongside, and in the foreground a smoking camp-fire, over which was slung a battered kettle. There was very little fire, and a great deal of smoke, which at first obscured the view, and prevented me from understanding why it was that the gipsies, usually so quick to mark a stranger, gazed at me with indifference-not a hand was stretched forth to beg, nor a voice raised in supplication. The men were standing about in listless attitudes, and the women crouched round the fire were swaying their bodies to and fro, as though in pain. On other occasions, whenever I had attempted to approach a gipsy settlement, I had been wellnigh besieged by the noisy importunities of the people, and had found considerable difficulty in extricating myself from their grasp.

Soon, however, the shining point of a bayonet, which I descried through the curling smoke, gave me the clue to this abnormal be

haviour; and approaching nearer, I saw the figures of three Hungarian gendarmes dodging about between. the ragged tent and the skeleton donkey.

They were searching the camp, as they presently informed me, for a stolen purse; this was marketday, and a Saxon peasant had had his pocket picked. Some of the gipsies had been seen in town that morning, so of course they must be guilty-and the speaker, with an oath, stuck his bayonet into the depths of the little tent, bringing out a motley assortment of dirty rags to light, which he proceeded to turn over with scrutinising investigation.

Any person with a well-balanced mind would, I suppose, have rejoiced at the improving spectacle of stern justice punishing degraded vice. I must, however, confess my sympathies on this occasion to have been all the wrong way, and I could not refrain from wishing that these poor hunted mortals might elude their punishment, whether deserved or not.

Justice, as represented by these well-fed stolid gendarmes, who were turning over the contents of the little camp so ruthlessly, holding up each sorry rag to light with such pitiless scorn, stripping the clothes from the half-naked backs of the gipsies, with such needless brutality, appeared in the light of churlish and unnecessary persecution; while vice so wretched and piteous-looking could surely inspire no harsher feeling than compassion?

Of the females, the most noticeable was a young woman of about twenty-five, with splendid eyes, skin of a mahogany brown, and

straight-cut regular features, like those of an Indian chieftainess. She wore a tattered scarlet cloak, and had on her breast a small brown baby, naked in spite of the sharpness of the November air. One of the gendarmes approaching her, with a coarse gesture would have removed the cloak (apparently her sole upper garment) to search beneath for the missing purse; but with the air of an outraged empress she waved him off, and raising her large black eyes full upon him, she broke into a torrent of speech. The language in which she spoke was unknown to me; but the tenor of her words was easy to guess at, from her expressive gestures, and the wonderful play of feature. Her voice was of a rich contralto, as she poured forth what seemed to be the malediction of an oppressed queen cursing a tyrant. Her gesture had an inbred majesty, and her pose was that of an inspired sibyl. I thought what a glorious tragic actress she would make, a perfect Lady Macbeth, or a divine Azucena: even the brutal gendarme felt her influence, for he did not attempt to molest her further, but withdrew half shamefacedly, as though conscious of defeat, transferring his attentions to one of the men, whom he roughly poked with the butt-end of his gun, to force him to rise from his recumbent position.

The fruitless investigation had now come to an end; every nook and corner had been examined, the ragged tent demolished, and the skeleton donkey unladen, without so much as a single florin being found about the party. In a long parley between gendarmes and gipsies, the words "Flinka, Flinka!" were often repeated; and Flinka, it appeared, was the name of the only one of the gipsies who was at that moment missing from

the camp. She was expected back presently, they said.

Hearing this, the gendarmes proceeded to light their pipes at the lingering fire, playfully upsetting the caldron which contained the Bohemians' supper on to the ground, and prepared to await the return of Madame or Mademoiselle Flinka, one of them walking up and down as sentry, to see that no one attempted to leave the camp.

There being nothing more to see, I took my leave, for it was growing late, and I had still a long walk before me. I had almost forgotten the little episode with the gipsies, when near the town I was met by a small cart with dirty linen awning, and drawn by a meagre white horse, worthy companion to the skeleton ass. Probably I should not have given this cart a second thought or glance, for it was nearly dusk by this time; but as it passed me, two or three curly black heads peeped out from under the linen covering, and with incredible alacrity as many semi-naked children bounded out, indiarubber-like, and surrounded me with clamorous begging. While I was giving them a few coppers, I saw that in the cart was sitting a pale, haggard young woman, probably their mother, holding the reins, and waiting for the children to get in. There was no one else inside.

"Is your name Flinka?" I asked, as a thought struck me.

She gazed at me in a bewildered manner, and did not speak; but her panic-struck face was answer enough.

"Do not go back to the camp to-night," I said, speaking on the impulse of the moment; "the gendarmes are there, and they are waiting for you."

She gazed at me with positive

terror in her wild dilated eyes, the terror of a hunted animal which sees the huntsmen closing in upon it from every side; then, without a word of explanation or thanks, she abruptly turned round the horse's head, and, lashing it to its utmost speed, disappeared in the opposite direction.

Several very worthy friends have since declared my behaviour on this occasion to have been most reprehensible and incorrect; I had sided with the malefactor, and probably defeated the ends of justice by screening the culprit from deserved punishment; I had outraged virtue and protected vice. No doubt they are right; and it must be owing to some vital defect in my moral constitution that I have never succeeded in feeling the slightest remorse for what I had done. On the contrary, it was with a feeling of particular satisfaction that I thought that evening of the three ruffian gendarmes waiting in vain for the return of the guilty Flinka. I wonder how long they waited, and how many pipes they smoked, and to how many oaths they gave vent, when they perceived that their victim was not going to walk into the trap after all!

Among the many writers who have made of the gipsy race their special study, none has, to my thinking, succeeded so perfectly in describing their inward life as the late Abbé Liszt, in his valuable work on Gipsy Music, has done. Other authors have analysed and described them with scientific accuracy, but their opinions are mostly tinged by prejudice or enthusiam; for while Grellnann approaches the subject with evident repugnance, like a naturalist dissecting some nauseous reptile in the interest of science, Borrow

idealises and embellishes his figures Peralmost beyond recognition. haps it needed a Hungarian to do thorough justice to this subject, for the Hungarian is the only man who is to some extent united by sympathetic bonds to the Tzigane; and he alone had succeeded in identifying himself with the gipsy mind, and comprehending all the strange contradictions of this living paradox.

I cannot therefore do better than quote (in somewhat free translation) some passages frome the work in question, which, far better than any words of mine, will sketch the portrait of the Hungarian Tzigane :

"There appeared one day amongst the European nations an unknown tribe, a strange people of whom no one was able to say who they were, nor whence they had come. They spread themselves out over our Continent, manifesting, however, neither desire of conquest, nor ambition to acquire the right of a fixed domicile ; not attempting to lay claim to so much as an inch of land, but not suffering themselves to bedeprived of a single hour of their time. Not caring to command, they neither chose to obey; they had nothing to give of their own, and were satisfied with accepting nothing. They never spoke of their native land, and gave no clue as to from which Asiatic or African

plains they had wandered, nor what troubles or persecutions had necessitated their expatriation. Strangers alike to memory as to hope, they kept aloof from the benefits of colonisation, and too proud of their melancholy race to suffer admixture with other nations, they lived on, satisfied with the rejection of every foreign element. Deriving no advantage from the Christian civilisation around

them, they regarded with alike antipathy every other form of religion.

"This singular race, so strange as to resemble no other, possessing neither country, history, cultus, nor any sort of codex, seems only to continue to exist because it does not

choose to cease existing, and will only exist such as it has always been. Instruction, authority, persuasion, and persecution have alike been powerless to reform, modify, or exterminate it. Broken up into wandering tribes and hordes, roving hither and thither as chance or fancy directs, without means of communication, and mostly ignoring each other's existence, they nevertheless betray their common relationship by unmistakable signs: the self-same type of feature, the same language, the same habits and customs.

"With a senseless or sublime contempt for whatever binds or hampers, the Tziganes ask nothing from the earth but life. They preserve their individuality by constant intercourse with nature, as well as by their absolute indifference towards all men not belonging to their race, with whom they only commune so far as requisite for obtaining the common necessities of daily life.

Like the Jews, they have natural taste and ability for fraud; but unlike these, it is without systematic hatred or malice. Hatred and revenge are only personal and accidental feelings, never premeditated ones. Harmless when their immediate wants are satisfied, they are incapable of any preconceived and unanimous intentions of injuring; they only wish to preserve the liberty of the wild horse, not comprehending how any one can prefer a roof, be it ever so fine, to the shelter of the forest canopy.

"Authority, laws, rules, principles, duties, and obligations, are alike incomprehensible ideas of this singular race; partly from indolence of spirit, partly from indifference to the evil consequences resulting from their irregular mode of living.

"Such as it is only, the Tzigane loves his life, and would exchange it for no other. He loves his life when, slumbering in a copse of young birch trees, he fancies himself surrounded by a group of slender maidens, their long hanging hair bestrewed with shining sapphire stones, and to whose swaying bodies the wind imparts graceful and coquettish gestures, as though each of them were trembling and thrilling under the kiss of an invisible lover. The Tzigane loves

his life when, for hours together, his eyes follow the geometrical figures described in the sky overhead by the strategical movements of a flight of rooks; when he gauges his cunning against the wary bustard, or overcomes the silvery trout in a trial of lightning-like agility. He loves his life when, shaking the wild crabapple tree, he causes a hailstorm of ruddy fruit to come pouring down upon him; when he picks the underripe berries from off a thorny branch, leaving the sandy ground flecked with drops of gory red; when bending over a murmuring spring, whose grateful coolness refreshes his parched throat as its gurgling music delights his ear; when he hears the woodpecker tapping a hollow stem, or can distinguish the faint sound of a distant mill-wheel. He loves his life when, gazing on the grey green depths of some lonely mountain lake - its surface spellbound in the dawning presentiment of approaching winter-he lets his vagrant fancy float hither and thither unchecked; when reclining high up on the branch of some lofty foresttree, hammock-like he is rocked to and fro, while each leaf around him seems quivering with ecstacy at the song of the nightingale. He loves his life when, out of the myriads of everdancing stars, in the illimitable space overhead, he chooses one to be his own particular sweetheart; when he loses his heart to-day to a gorgeous lilac-bush of overwhelming perfume, to-morrow to a slender hawthorn or graceful eglantine, to be as quickly forgotten at sight of a brilliant peacock-feather with which he adorns his cap as with a victorious wartrophy; when he sits by the smouldering camp-fire under ancient oaks or massive elms; when in the nighttime he hears the call of the stag,and the lowing of the respondent doe-the soft drowsy cooing of doves; when he has no other society than the birds and beasts of the forest, with whom he forms friendships and enmities, caressing or tormenting them; depriving them of liberty or setting them free, like a wanton child despoiling his parents' riches without knowledge of their value, but knowing these riches to be too great to be ever exhausted.

"Having neither Bible nor Gospel to go by, the gipsies do not see the necessity of fatiguing their brain with the contemplation of abstract ideas; and only following their instincts, their intelligence grows rusty. Conscious of their harmlessness. they bask in the rays of the sun, content in the satisfaction of a few primitive and elementary passions, the sans-géne of their soul fettered by no conventional virtues.

"What strength of indolence, what utter want of all social instinct, must these people possess, in order to live as they have done for centuries, like that strange plant, native of the sandy desert, so aptly termed the wind's bride, which devoid of root by nature, and blown about from side to side by every breeze, bears nevertheless its flowers and fruit wherever it goes, and continues to put forth shoots under the most unlikely conditions!

"And whenever the gipsies have endeavoured to bring themselves to a settled mode of life, and to adopt household habits, have they not invariably sooner or later returned to their hard couch on the cold ground, to their miserable rags, to their rough comrades and the brown beauty of their women, to the sombre shades of the virgin forests, to the murmur of unknown fountains, to their glowing camp-fires and their improvised concerts under a starlit sky, to their intoxicating dances in the lighting of a forest glade, to the merry knavery of their thievish pranks-in one word, to the hundred and one excitements they cannot do without?

"Nature, when once indulged in to the extent of becoming a necessity, grows tyrannical like any other passion, and the charms of such an existence can neither be explained nor coldly analysed: he only who

has tasted of them can measure their power aright.

"He must needs have slumbered often under the canopy of the starry heaven; often have been awakened by the darts of the rising sun shooting like fiery arrows between his eyelids; have felt without horror the glossy serpent coil itself caressingly around a naked limb; must have spent full many a long summer day reclining immovable on the sward, overlapped by billowy waves of flowery grasses which have never known the mower's scythes gazing into the blue depths of the sky above. He must have listened often to the rich orchestral effects and tempestuous melodies which the hurricane loves to draw from vibrating pine-stems. He must be able to recognise each tree by its perfume, be initiated into all the varied languages of the feathered tribes, of merry finches and of chattering grasshoppers. Full often must he have ridden at close of day over the barren wold, when the rays of the setting sun cast a golden veil over the atmosphere, and all around appears to be plunged in a bath of living fire; he must have watched the red-hot moon rise out of the sable night over lonely plains whence all living beings seem to have died away. He must have led a life like the Tzigane in order to comprehend that it is impossible to exist without the balmy perfumes exhaled by the forests; that one cannot find rest within stone prisons; that a breast accustomed to draw full draughts of the purest ether feels weighted down and crushed beneath a sheltering roof; that the eye which has daily looked on the rising sun breaking out through pearly clouds must weep, forsooth, when met on all sides by dull opaque walls; that the ear hungers when deprived of the broad modulations of those exquisite harmonies of which the evening breeze alone has the secret.

What have our cities to offer in exchange to senses surfeited with such ever-varying effects and emotions? What in such eyes can ever equal the bloody drama of a dying sun? What can rival in voluptuous sweetness the rosy halo of the early dawn? What other voice can surpass in majesty the thunder-roll of a midsummer storm,