Had Mr. Leland said that, with the exception of myself, “no writer whatever” had even alluded to the phenomenon described, I believe he would have stated what was true. I endeavoured to explain it in a Disquisition of 171 pages, which he indirectly admitted he “carefully read”; so that if I did not “clearly explain” the “puzzle and muddle” it must have proceeded from a lack of intellect on my part, or on his in not understanding me. Since then I have frequently expatiated on and described it, but I am not aware that Mr. Leland has seen what I wrote on these occasions. In _The Scottish Churches and the Gipsies_ I said that the Gipsy problem “may at first present an aspect of a ‘labyrinth of difficulties’”; but that to solve it “there is little intellect wanted for the occasion, but such as it is it should be allowed to act freely on the subject of inquiry” (p. 23). To judge of Mr. Leland’s works on the Gipsies one would think that he had been indebted to no one for anything; so that it is remarkable he should have complained that _novelists_ should not have “clearly explained” to him what he himself should have told us—particularly as he spoke of his “great experience” among the Gipsies—unless it appears that even to novelists he—as a professional writer taking up a subject that came to his hand—has been indebted for putting him on the track for repeating or illustrating an “oft-told tale.” {18} We can easily imagine how Mr. Leland got “puzzled and muddled” in contemplating his subject when he says so positively that the Gipsies are disappearing as “British birds are chasing American ones out of Philadelphia”; and that the mixed state of Gipsydom seen at Cobham Fair “was old before the Saxon Heptarchy” (p. 140). What he said he could find in “no writer whatever” was elaborately described in the book which I published. That he used for his own purposes, and then apparently turned round and threw out his heels at it.