Another party, besides this or that appellation for the Gipseys, considered their unsettled way of life, or selected some particular circumstance from their manners, by which they decided concerning their origin. Wherefore they were sometimes torlaques, faquirs, or kalendars; {139} sometimes the remains of Attila’s Huns, at other times the Avari, who were vanquished by Charles the Great: then again Petschenegers, who played their last stake in the twelfth century; or perhaps a mixture of all kinds of rascally people gathered together, having collectively no certain country, as their name _Zigeuner_ indicates, signifying, ‘to wander up and down;’—for which reason, it is said, our German ancestors denominated every strolling vagrant Zichegan. By several writers they have been thought inhabitants of the Alps and Pyrenées; others suppose them to be Cain’s descendants, who, on account of the curse denounced against their stock, have been compelled to lead a wandering vagrant life. Because they pretend to tell fortunes, some have supposed them to be Chaldeans, or some Syrian religious sect. Brodæus formed his judgment from their clothes, in which he thought he discovered a resemblance to the Roman toga; and thence he imagined they were natives of Wallachia, descendants from the colony sent by Trajan into Dacia to keep this newly-conquered country steady in its allegiance. And, according to his assertion, people in Germany do really call them _Wahlen_ (he writes _Walachen_), that is to say, _Italians_.