Kola is suave and courtly, and if you had asked him what were his name and nationality he would have replied at once that he was Nicolas Tshoron, a Caucasian, Russian, Ruthenian, Galitsian, or Hungarian. He has now removed his kingdom to Brazil, and if you were to follow him across the Atlantic and repeat the question it is probable that he would elect to call himself Italian, French, or English. He may be all of these if a short period of residence is sufficient qualification; but, though he knows it not, Rumania has stronger claims to him, and India stronger claims still. Sitting on the carpeted floor of his great pedimental tent, surrounded by his family and connexions, you would have found that he is really Worsho, son of Grantsha, and that he is a Gypsy. Not, of course, exactly the kind we know; he would call our Gypsies scornfully _Sinte_, and claim that he and his tribe alone are the _Roma_. Intellectually he is a giant. In the morning his subjects would set out to solicit orders, returning despondently as night fell with empty hands or single pans on their shoulders. But Kola would march triumphantly to the camp followed by a lorry heavily laden with cauldrons he had collected for repair. It was Kola who directed the work, and when any special difficulty arose it was he who sat down and overcame it. He was completely illiterate; yet he used a complicated form of contract which he dictated and his patrons wrote and signed. It concealed artfully the extortionate charges he proposed to make, and hoodwinked not only the authorities of a great political club but even those of a municipal kitchen. And it was Kola who faced the indignant customer who came to protest against the charge, and either browbeat him into submission or put him into court. The craft of the Gypsies was magnificent, and they wielded their hammers sensitively, as if there were nerve-endings in the heads. They were admittedly more skilful than British coppersmiths, ready to undertake and execute successfully work that would elsewhere be refused as impossible. But their ideas of remuneration were grandiose, and in a country where bargaining is a neglected science they retained an oriental habit of demanding ten times as much as they were prepared to accept. It mattered not if his customers were offended—Kola never intended to see them again. And so he and his subjects spent a few weeks in each town collecting work, a few weeks in doing it, and a few turbulent and glorious weeks in exacting payment. Then they shook the dust from off the soles of their feet, and departed for ever from the city they had exhausted.