The settled Gypsy’s dwelling is even more primitive than the Wallachs. The hut is formed, like the African’s, with plaited sticks, and swish is plastered into the gaps. Before the hut entrance often stands the nomad cart, two wheeled and tilted, and always stands the tripod supporting the iron pot--a sight, like the scarlet cloak, once familiar to us, but now disappeared from England. In time the earth is grass-grown; and as the hovel is rarely more than seven feet high, it looks rather like an exaggerated ant-hill or a tumulus than a habitation for man. Yet the ragged inmate, whose children go about in nature’s garb, is clever with his hands. He is the best blacksmith in the country, and he fashions simple wooden articles for household use with dexterity and even with taste. Despite his wretched surroundings, he keeps his good spirits, he sings to his work, and he plays the violin in his leisure hours. I need hardly repeat the commonplaces about the music of the Hungarian Gypsy, and the legends concerning Catalani and Liszt. Strolling bands, in civilized attire, and performing upon divers instruments, are and have been for some time well known to the capitals of Europe. So great is the contrast between their art and their surroundings, that more than one traveller has suspected this marvellous gift of pathetic strains to be a “language brought with them in their exile from another and a higher state of existence.” I find in it only the marriage of Eastern with Western melody, the high science of the former, so little appreciated by the ignorant Anglo-Indian, with the perfect practice of the latter. Though utterly unalphabetic, these people have a strange power of stirring their hearers’ hearts. They play by ear, in style unsurpassed by the best training, the violin, the ’cello, and the zither, with which London is now familiarized. The airs, often their own, tell a thrilling national tale in a way that makes an indelible impression upon the stranger. Now it is the expression of turmoil, battle, and defeat, followed by a long wail of woe, of passionate grief, mostly in the minor key. Then it suddenly passes to the major in a wild burst of joy, of triumph, of exultation, of rapture, which carries along with it the hearer in irresistible sympathy. It has all the charm of contrast; of extremes, excitement and depression; subjection and deliverance, delight and despair. The strains rob the excitable Hungarian of his reason; he drinks in the music till he is drunk.