Which is a question that very few can answer. There is to be found in almost every cheap book, or "penny dreadful" and newspaper shop in Great Britain and America, for sale at a very low price a Book of Fate--or something equivalent to it, for the name of these works is legion--and one publisher advertises that he has nearly thirty of them, or at least such books with different titles. In my copy there are twenty-five pages of incantations, charms, and spells, every one of them every whit as "superstitious" as any of the gypsy ceremonies set forth in this volume. I am convinced, from much inquiry, that next to the Bible and the Almanac there is no one book which is so much disseminated among the million as the fortune-teller, in some form or other. [1] That is to say, there are, numerically, many millions more of believers in such small sorcery now in Great Britain than there were centuries ago, for, be it remembered, the superstitions of the masses were always petty ones, like those of the fate-books; it was only the aristocracy who consulted Cornelius Agrippa, and could afford la haute magie. We may call it by other names, but fry, boil, roast, powder or perfume it as we will, the old faith in the supernatural and in "occult" means of getting at it still exists in one form or another--the parable or moral of most frequent occurrence in it being that of the Mote and the Beam, of the real and full meaning of which I can only reply in the ever-recurring refrain of the Edda: "Understand ye this--or what?" CHAPTER I. THE ORIGIN OF WITCHCRAFT, SHAMANISM, AND SORCERY.--VINDICTIVE AND MISCHIEVOUS MAGIC. As their peculiar perfume is the chief association with spices, so sorcery is allied in every memory to gypsies. And as it has not escaped many poets that there is something more strangely sweet and mysterious in the scent of cloves than in that of flowers, so the attribute of inherited magic power adds to the romance of these picturesque wanderers. Both the spices and the Romany come from the far East--the fatherland of divination and enchantment. The latter have been traced with tolerable accuracy, if we admit their affinity with the Indian Dom and Domar, back to the threshold of history, or well-nigh into prehistoric times, and in all ages they, or their women, have been engaged, as if by elvish instinct, in selling enchantments, peddling prophecies and palmistry, and dealing with the devil generally in a small retail way. As it was of old so it is to-day-- Ki shan i Romani Adoi san' i chov'hani. Wherever gypsies go, There the witches are, we know.