in all human probability, be spoken on the other side of the Atlantic years after the last traces of it have vanished from amongst ourselves. We begin even now to miss the picturesque aspects of Gipsy life—the tent, the strange dress, the nomadic habits. English Gipsies are no longer pure and simple vagrants. They are tinkers, or scissor-grinders, or basket-makers, or travel from fair to fair with knock-’em-downs, or rifle galleries, or itinerant shows. Often they have some ostensible place of residence. But they preserve their inner life as carefully as the Jews in Spain, under the searching persecution of the Inquisition, preserved their faith for generation upon generation; and even now it is a belief that when, for the sake of some small kindness or gratuity, a Gipsy woman has allowed her child to be baptised, she summons her friends, and attempts to undo the effect of the ceremony by subjecting the infant to some weird, horrible incantation of Eastern origin, the original import of which is in all probability a profound mystery to her. There is a quaint story of a Yorkshire Gipsy, a prosperous horse-dealer, who, becoming wealthy, came up to town, and, amongst other sights, was shown a goldsmith’s window. His sole remark was that the man must be a big thief indeed to have so many spoons and watches all at once. The expression of opinion was as naïve and artless as that of Blucher, when observing that London was a magnificent city ‘for to sack.’ Mr. Smith’s benevolent intentions speak for themselves. But if he hopes to make the Gipsy ever other than a Gipsy, to transform the Romany into a Gorgio, of to alter habits of life and mind which have remained unchanged for centuries, he must be singularly sanguine, and must be somewhat too disposed to overlook the marvellously persistent influences of race and tongue.”