Mr. Watts has remarked on Borrow’s neglect to portray the higher traits in the gipsy woman’s character. Mrs. Herne and her grandchild Leonora, who are instanced as the two great successes of his Romany group, are both steeped in wickedness, and by omitting to draw a picture of the women’s loftier side, he is said to have failed to demonstrate their great claim for distinction. There is a good deal of truth in this accusation; and yet it cannot be admitted wholly justifiable. In “The Romany Rye” we have a whole chapter devoted to the emphasising of the chastity of the Romany girls, and their self-sacrificing devotion to their husbands. Ursula marries a lazy, good-for-nothing _chal_, and then expressess her willingness to steal and swindle in order to keep him in comfort. The method is not commendable, but the object that prompts it is highly praiseworthy—from a Romany point of view. But to-day the old race of genuine Romanies is fast dying out, and soon we shall have wholly lost the traces of a people who for many centuries have constituted a familiar feature of English country life. One of the last surviving _chals_ of an old East Anglian gipsy family, in reply to a remark of the writer said, not long ago, “Yes, it is quite true that the old race of gipsies is dying out; there are very few of the real old Romanies to be met with at the present day. ‘Mumpers’ there are in plenty; folks who sell baskets and peddle clothes-pegs; but they are not of the true gipsy breed. At one time a gipsy never married out of his or her own tribe; but that day has gone, and there has been reared a mixed race with little of the true blood in them. Marrying into the ‘mumping’ and house-dwelling families has brought this about, and soon there will be no true Romanies left. Here and there you may meet a few, such as the Grays, Lees, and Coopers, and one or two of the Pinfolds; but they, too, are going the way of the rest. Yes, as you say, it is a pity, for after all the Romanies are a strange people, and, bad as they may have been, they were not without their good points. They knew a good horse when they saw one, and they let people see how a man, if he chooses, can shift for himself, without being beholden to any one. Anyhow, they have given clever men something to puzzle their brains about, and their language is not, as some would have it, a mere thieves ‘patter,’ but is a good, if not a better one, than that which the clever men speak themselves.”