by the presence of a Spanish official, that the latter asked me in astonishment how he had managed to offend his host. But what could the Santa _Hermandad_ alias _La Bruja_ (the witch) find to plunder and pillage in the tent of the Rom? During three centuries of loose wild life, often stained by ferocious crime, and made bestial by the Draconian laws of mediæval Christianity, the Gypsies had their seasons of banishment, torture, and execution; but their poverty and isolation saved them from the horrors of a deliberate and official persecution. _Mas pobre que cuerpo de Gitano_ (Nothing poorer than a Gypsy’s body) is still a proverb in Spain, where men also say, _Tan ruin es el conde como los Gitanos_. All these barbarities ended in Europe with the close of the eighteenth century, where the new Religion of Humanity had been preached by the encyclopedists whose major prophets were Voltaire and Rousseau, Diderot and D’Alembert. No Disraeli has hitherto arisen to vindicate the nobility of these “masterful beggars”; and to chronicle their triumphs in court and camp, in arts and arms; to trace them in the genealogies of titled houses, or to strip off the disguises assumed during the intolerant times when the Jew was compelled to swear himself Gentile and the Muslim a Christian. Yet the Gypsies have had their great men, whilst their pure blood has leavened much dull clay and given fresh life to many an effete noble vein. Witness the “King Zindl” or “Zindelo”; the Dukes Michael and Andrew; Counts Ion (Juan) and Panuel (Manuel) of Little Egypt; the Waywodes (Vaivodes) of Dacia; the noble cavalier Pedro, and the chief, Tomas Pulgar, who in A.D. 1496 aided Bishop Sigismund to beat off the Turk invader. Witness, again, the Hungarian Hunyadis, the Russian Tolstoys, and the Scotch Melvilles, not to speak of the Cassilis and the Contis under Louis XIV. Certain Gypsies became soldiers of renown; and John Bunyan, one of the immortals of the earth, is shrewdly suspected of Gypsy descent. Borrow mentions an archbishop and “four dignified ecclesiastics”; while some of the most learned and famed of the priesthood in Spain have been, according to a Gypsy, of the Gypsies, or at least of Gypsy blood. Such is the Gypsy summed up in a few lines. These pages have no intention, I repeat, of treating the subject of the Romá generally. My humbler task is confined to showing the affinities between the Gypsies and the great Jat tribe, or rather nation, which extends from the mouths of the Indus to the Steppes of Central Asia. And my first objection must be to a question of precedence with M. Paul Bataillard.