generally perform in bands consisting of four or five men each. These usually play upon one or two violins, a mandoline, and the Pandean pipes. Their music is wild and plaintive, giving the impression from a distance that two or three bagpipes are being played. They have the credit of being very good musicians, and of being able to perform national airs from the ear alone. Some of them have risen to the position of acknowledged composers, and indeed, for that matter, many individuals amongst the gipsy race occupy comparatively high posts in other departments of human intelligence. [Illustration: ROUMANIAN GIRL.] [Illustration: GIPSY.] Another section are workers in metal, such as tinkers and brass-founders; a third work in wood, and perform various duties connected with the building trade; but a large proportion are still vagabonds and thieves, who infest the country, and are a nuisance to the honest peasants and labourers. The last-named class profess no religion and obey no law, excepting the criminal law when they are forced. The settled part of the gipsy community belong to the national Church; the women are chaste as against the Roumanians, but their morality is said to be very lax amongst themselves. It is, however, hardly fair to speak in these general terms of the gipsy race at present. As already stated, many of them occupy very honourable positions in society; and some years since a German writer predicted what is now taking place, namely, a fusion of the gipsies with the Roumanians.[37] We were informed by a learned philologist in Bucarest that this process is rapidly going on; the castes are not so clearly defined; intermarriages with Roumanians are of daily occurrence; many of the gipsies do not even know their own language; and their number is rapidly diminishing. Intellectually they are talented, but lazy. Many of the men, and still more of the women, are very handsome. Although every gradation of shade is to be found amongst their faces, pretty much as one sees in the negro race in the United States, the features of the Roumanian gipsies are generally well-formed Indo-European. Nothing is more striking than to see two women pass each other, or walking side by side: the one a Roumanian, fair, florid, and blue-eyed, the other a gipsy with a skin as black as a sloe, jet-black hair, and black eyes, and yet the features similar in both cases, and each woman in her way handsome.[38]