over again dirt peeling off the poor children’s bodies and faces like a skin, and leaving a kind of white patch behind it, presenting a kind of a piebald spectacle. Some of the children never take their clothes off till they drop off in shreds. Many of the Gipsies, both old and young, have only one suit of clothes. English delicacy of feeling and sentiment for female virtue must stand abashed with horror at this kind of civilisation in the nineteenth century of Christian England. I have seen washing done on the Sunday afternoon among them, and while the clothes have been drying on the line the women and children have been roasting themselves before the fires in nearly a nude state. A Sunday or two ago a poor Gipsy woman was washing her only smoky-looking blanket late in the afternoon, and upon which she would have to lay that night. It was a cold, wintry, drizzling afternoon, and how it was to get dry was a puzzle to me. A Gipsy woman, named Hearn, said to me a few days ago, in answer to some conversation relating to their dirty habits; “The reason for the Gipsies not washing themselves oftener was on account of their catching cold after each time they washed.” She “only washed herself once in a fortnight, and she was almost sure to catch cold after it.” In some things the real old Gipsies are very particular, _i.e._, they will on no account take their food out of cups, saucers, or basins, that have been washed in the same pansions in which their linen has been washed; so sensitive are they on this point that if they found out that by an accident this custom had been transgressed they would immediately break the vessel to pieces. This is a custom picked up by the Gipsies among the Jews in their wandering from India through the Holy Land. Another practice they adopt in common with the Jews is, swearing or taking oaths over their dead relations. The customs, practices, and words picked up by them during their wanderings have added to their mystification. While they will respect certain delicacy observed among the Jews, they will eat pork, the most detestable of all food in the eyes of the Israelites, and will even pay a greater price for it than for beef or mutton. An Englishwoman, who had married a Gipsy named Smith, told me very recently, in presence of her mother-in-law and another woman, that she had seen her husband eat a small plate of cooked snails as a dainty. While the daughter-in-law was telling me this, the old Gipsy mother-in-law, with one foot in the grave, not far from Mary’s Place, near the Potteries, Notting Hill, was trying to make me believe what a choice dish there was in store for me if I would allow her to cook me a hedgehog. She said I should “find it nicer than the finest rabbit or pheasant I had ever tasted.” The fine, old, Gipsy woman, as regards her appearance, although suffering from congestion of lungs and inflammation, and expecting every