“‘In their own interest, and without mincing matters, it is time the plain facts of their dark lives were brought to daylight, so that the brightening and elevating effects of public opinion, law, and the Bible may have their influence upon the character of the little ones about to become in our midst the men and women of the future. Outside their hovels or sack huts, poetically called “tents” and “encampments,” but in reality schools for teaching their children how to gild double-dyed lies, sugar-coat deception, gloss idleness and filth, and put a pleasant and cheerful aspect upon taking things that do not belong to them, may be seen thousands of ragged, half-naked, dirty, ignorant, and wretched Gipsy children, and the men loitering about mostly in idleness. Inside their sack hovels are to be found man, wife, and six or seven children of all ages, not one of them able to read or write, squatting or sleeping upon a bed of straw, which through the wet and damp is often little better than a manure-heap, in fact sometimes it is completely rotten, and as a Gipsy woman told me last week, “it is not fit to be handled with the hands.” In noticing that many of the Gipsy children have a kind of eye disease, I am told by the women that it is owing to the sulphur arising from the coke fire they have upon the ground in their midst, and which at times also causes the children to turn pale and sickly.’” The following brief account of the Hungarian Gipsies of the present day, as seen by a writer under the initials “A. C.,” who visited the Unitarian Synod in Hungary last summer, is taken from the _Unitarian Herald_, bearing date January 9th, 1880, and in which the author says:—“Not far from Rugonfalva we came on a colony of exceedingly squalid Gipsies, living in huts which a respectable Zulu would utterly despise. Their appearance reminded me of Cowper’s graphic sketch, which I am tempted to quote:— “‘I see a column of slow-rising smoke O’ertop the lofty wood that skirts the wild. A vagabond and useless tribe there eat Their miserable meal. A kettle, flung Between two poles upon a stick transverse, Receives the morsel—flesh obscene of dog, Or vermin, or, at best, of cock purloined From his accustomed perch. Hard-faring race, They pick their fuel out of every hedge, Which, kindled with dry leaves, just saves unqueuched The spark of life. The sportive wind blows wide Their fluttering rags, and shows a tawny skin, The vellum of the livery they claim.’