Profound research and philosophical observation and reasoning do not seem to constitute Mr. Leland’s forte. It is a little puzzling to decide how to treat a man like him; for his “confident assertions” in regard to the disappearance, or what some would call the _extinction_, of the race are but “contradictions” of his own information and opinions; saying nothing of what I published at great length on the perpetuation of the Gipsies in a settled state, all of which he admits having “carefully read.” Among Mr. Leland’s information is the following:— “Go where we may we find the Jew. Has any other wandered so far? Yes, one; for wherever Jew has gone there too we find the Gipsy” (p. 18). “It . . . . has penetrated into every village which European civilization has ever touched. He who speaks Romany . . . . will meet those with whom a very few words may at once establish a peculiar understanding . . . This widely spread brotherhood . . . are honestly proud that a gentleman is not ashamed of them” (p. 25). “Communities of gentlemanly and lady-like Gipsies’” in Russia (p. 25). “All the Gipsies in the country are not upon the roads. Many of them live in houses, and that very respectably, nay, even aristocratically. Yea, and it may be, O reader, that thou hast met them and knowest them not . . . It is intelligible enough” that such a Gipsy “should say as little as possible of his origin, . . . and ever carefully keep the lid of silence on the pot of his birth” (p. 272). “The Gipsy of society, not always, but yet frequently, retains a keen interest in his wild ancestry. He keeps up the language; it is a delightful secret; he loves now and then to take a look at ‘the old thing’ [one of my phrases, as I have already mentioned] . . . I know ladies in England and in America, both of the blood and otherwise, who would give up a ball of the highest flight in society to sit an hour in a Gipsy tent, and on whom a whispered word in Romany acts like wild-fire. Great as my experience has been I can really no more explain the intensity of this yearning, this _rapport_, than I can fly. My own fancy for Gipsydom is faint and feeble compared to what I have found in many others” (p. 274). One would naturally conclude that this _race_ is not disappearing as “British birds are chasing American ones out of Philadelphia”; and that it could not be said that “the child is perhaps born who will see the last Gipsy,” even in his primitive condition. {16} Mr. Leland explains, in his chapter on Cobham Fair, how the Gipsy problem “puzzled and muddled” him.