But the people say that it is rarely good to seek for hidden treasures, for much of the gold buried in the country has been secured by a heavy curse, so that he who raises it will be pursued by illness or misfortune to himself and his family, unless he is descended in direct line from the man who buried the treasure. Only such treasures as lie above-ground exposed to the light of day may be appropriated without misgiving. Many men have lost their reason, or have become crippled or blind, but few indeed were ever made happy by gold dug out of the earth. FOOTNOTES: [63] The present river Strell. [64] Evidently funeral urns. CHAPTER XXXII. THE TZIGANES: LISZT AND LENAU. Among the many writers who have made of this singular race their special study, none, to my thinking, has succeeded in understanding them so perfectly as Liszt. Other authors have analyzed and described the gypsies with scientific accuracy, but their opinions are mostly tinged by prejudice or enthusiasm; for while Grellman approaches the subject with evident repugnance, like a naturalist dissecting some nauseous reptile in the interest of science, Borrow, on the contrary, idealizes his figures almost beyond recognition. Perhaps it needed a Hungarian to do justice to this subject, for the Hungarian is the only man who, to some extent, is united by sympathetic bonds to the Tzigane; he alone has succeeded in identifying himself with the gypsy mind, and comprehending all the strange contradictions of this living paradox. I cannot, therefore, do better than quote (in somewhat free translation) some passages from Liszt’s valuable work on gypsy music, which, far more vividly than any words of mine, will serve to sketch the portrait of the Hungarian Tzigane. “There started up one day betwixt the European nations an unknown tribe, a strange people of whom none was able to say who they were nor whence they had come. They spread themselves over our continent, manifesting, however, neither desire of conquest nor ambition to acquire the right of a fixed domicile; not attempting to lay claim to so much as an inch of land, but not suffering themselves to be deprived of a single hour of their time: not caring to command, they neither chose to obey. They had nothing to give of their own, and were content to owe nothing to others. They never spoke of their native land, and gave no clew as to from which Asiatic or African plains they had wandered, nor what troubles or persecutions had necessitated their expatriation. Strangers alike to memory as to hope, they kept aloof from the benefits of colonization; and too proud of their melancholy race to suffer admixture with other nations, they lived on, satisfied with the rejection of every foreign element. Deriving no advantage from the Christian civilization around them, they regarded with equal repugnance every other form of religion.