Where did these folk come from? Who are they? What are they? They have spread over most of Europe, and are found in Hungary, Bohemia, Roumania, Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, England, Turkey, and even America. They are a race and they have a language of their own. Theirs is a mixture of the ancient _Prakrit_ or Indian, with the different languages with which they have come in contact in the course of many centuries. Men who make a study of the history of languages say, that in their idioms, they show traces of roving for many centuries in Asiatic countries, before reaching Europe in or before the 15th century. They are often called “Bohemians” because Bohemia (Czecho-Slovakia) seems to have been their main European camping-ground. It is generally agreed that they came from India and that they are Asiatic, but they got their name _Gypsy_, a contraction of the word Egyptian, because people at first thought that they came from Egypt. The Gypsies have an extraordinary gift for music. They do not study it as an art, as we do, and cannot even read musical notes, but they imitate and memorize, and reach a high degree of skill in playing, particularly the violin. They have such great power of imitation, that they rapidly learn to play the instruments, and accustom themselves to the folk music they find wherever they wander. However, they always keep something of their own sadness and wildness. In Spain, they accompany themselves on the guitar, and mark the rhythm with castanets, as do the Spaniards themselves, borrowing the Spanish folk songs which they sing in their own way. In Russia, England, Turkey and everywhere they do the same with the folk music of those countries. The special traits, then, of the music of the Gypsies, are found rather in the way they play, interpret and express the music of others, than as composers of their own music. Yet they use strongly marked rhythms, florid ornamentation, and scales that are Oriental, which show us from where they came. Here is one of their most used scales: [Illustration: Scales] There are many kinds of scales among the Gypsies,—a mixture of the Oriental scale with the pentatonic, and with the European major and minor. The Hungarian Gypsy has made more music than any other branch of the Gypsy people. In fact, when we hear music that makes us exclaim, “Oh, that is real Gypsy music!” it is almost always Hungarian. At least one quarter of the inhabitants of Hungary, a name which comes from the barbarian tribe of Huns, are Magyars, descendants of Tartars and Mongolians of Asia, who settled in the land of the Huns in the 9th century. In the national music of Hungary, we find it hard to tell just what is Magyar, and what is Gypsy, because the two have intermingled for so long.