They are at war with mankind because they have always been cruelly oppressed and ill-treated; but as in our own country a George Smith of Coalville and a George Borrow in Spain have found the gipsy character well repay the efforts made to improve it, we may fairly hope Christianity will ultimately conquer even this stubborn race. They are light-hearted, clever, courteous, and forgiving, generous, and kind even, to strangers in distress; great lovers of Nature, and full of affection for dumb creatures; surely in such a race there must be the material for improvement! Rico, the gipsy king, soon became warmly attached to Elsworth, who spent many a pleasant hour in his sooty hut; pigs, fowls, and children wallowed and grovelled together in the mud-floored cabin, which was more suggestive of the Green Isle than of lordly Spain. It was worth a journey to Granada to hear and see Rico play the guitar. The instrument only really _lives_ in Spain, elsewhere it is but a feeble, voiceless toy; here it speaks, declaims, rouses and fires the brain, but then that is because the performer and the instrument become one. Rico’s guitar was part of himself, not only the strings but the body of the thing. Often he would gather round him some of the young men and women of the colony, who would accompany his playing with plantive, weird singing and hand-clapping, in perfect tune, strange Eastern dances, with wild gesticulation and choruses which seemed reminiscences of ancient Greece. In return Elsworth, with hearty, manly sympathy, would recite some sweet narrative from the Gospels, and win his way to the hearts of these poor people by stories of the Saviour’s love. Amulets, charms, fetishes, all these they knew. How the King of Heaven loved the despised Romany people, this was a strange thing to them which the Englishmen had come to teach. But it touched their hearts, poor outcasts! When he had completed the translation of the Gospel of St. Luke into their language, they would listen with apparent interest to his reading by hours together. This was not the sort of Christianity that had before been presented to them. In its grand simplicity and manifest adaptation to the wants of these wandering children of Nature, surely here if anywhere, was the ideal religion for them; and as for their teacher, who lived their life and proved in a hundred ways his devotion to their interests, who showed that he loved these people, outcast and despised as they were, because of his honour to them as children of the same Father whom he loved, surely they were bound to treat his mission with respect. And so four years had gone by. He had journeyed with the gipsies into many parts of Spain, but had always returned to Granada as his home, as the centre for his work and life interest.