It is certain that they are magicians. They have seen the hidden spring and have a vague remembrance of it; they have retained its dark reflection in their glance. The glance! they know its dormant and insinuating power. They know how to subdue weak minds by a glance. The least skilled in magic among them still believe that the "secret" of things is hidden away somewhere under a stone, and in their travels through every country on earth they often raise heavy boulders, whose peculiar shapes seem to indicate that they may conceal the mystery. They never find under the boulders anything but toads and snakes and scorpions, but they are skilled at making powerful potions from the blood and venom of the reptiles. They know, also, the secret properties of plants, and that the hemlock and belladonna vary in their effects when cut at certain times of the year and at certain hours, according to the influence of the seasons and the moon's rays. The gipsies are skilled in the science of poisons. Men and women--_roms_ and _juwas_--excel in the art of giving diseases to cattle. Their trades are only pretexts for calling at the houses they pass. They are coppersmiths simply because the art of subjecting metals to the action of fire was invented by the son of Cain, the progenitor of all accursed mortals. And they are saddlers because they like to be about horses, dear to all vagabonds. The gipsies, who were originally worshippers of fire, and now have no religion of their own, but always adopt that of the country they are passing through, are to mankind what Lucifer is to the angels. "We come from Egypt, if you please," Zinzara would sometimes say to the people of her tribe. "Indeed, that is where we had our homes and were a powerful race in the days of Moses. Then our ancestors were magicians to the kings of Egypt, who overcame death; but our origin is higher and farther away. "We come from a country where the _Secret Power of the World_ was discovered: a dragon guards the mystery on the summit of a lofty mountain, in a cavern, out of reach of whatever floods may come. "Our ancestor Çoudra learned from the high-priests the method of compelling the dragon to obey him. He entered the cavern and conceived the idea of universal knowledge, and resolved to avail himself of it in the outside world, in order that he might become a king and mighty among men--for why was he poor? Why does poverty exist, why death? "He had no sooner conceived his project of justifiable rebellion than the dragon sought to devour him. Our ancestor eluded him, and believed that, by virtue of the secrets he had discovered, he would be omnipotent on earth, but suddenly he found that he had almost forgotten them all, as if by magic. He no longer remembered any of them except those that do harm, those that produce disease, sorrow, misery, and death--all the evils from which he would have liked to free himself.