“Indifferent to the minute and complicated passions by which educated mankind is swayed, callous to the panting, gasping effects of such microscopic and supercultured vices as vanity, ambition, intrigue, and avarice, the Tzigane only comprehends the simplest requirements of a primitive nature. Music, dancing, drinking, and love, diversified by a childish and humorous delight in petty thieving and cheating, constitute his whole _répertoire_ of passions, beyond whose limited horizon he does not care to look.” * * * * * Having begun this chapter with the words of Liszt, let me finish it with those of the German poet Lenau, who, in his short poem, “Die Drei Zigeuner” (“The Three Gypsies”), traces a perfect picture of the indolent enjoyment of the gypsy’s existence: “One day, in the shade of a willow-tree laid, I came upon gypsies three, As through the sand of wild moorland My cart toiled wearily. “Giving to naught but himself a thought, His fiddle the first did hold, While ’mid the blaze of the evening rays A fiery lay he trolled. “His pipe with the lip the second did grip, A-watching the smoke that curled, As void of care as nothing there were Could better him in the world. “The third in sleep lay slumbering deep, On a branch swung his guitar; Through its strings did stray the winds at play, His soul was ’mid dreams afar. “With a patch or two of rainbow hue, Tattered their garb and torn; But little recked they what the world might say, Repaying its scorn with scorn. “And they taught to me, these gypsies three, When life is saddened and cold, How to dream or play or puff it away, Despising it threefold! “And oft on my track I would fain cast back A glance behind me there— A glance at that crew of tawny hue, With their swarthy shocks of hair.” CHAPTER XXXIII. THE TZIGANES: THEIR LIFE AND OCCUPATIONS. In every other country where the gypsies made their appearance they were oppressed and persecuted—treated as slaves or hunted down like wild beasts. So in Prussia in 1725 an edict was issued ordering that each gypsy found within the confines of the country should be forthwith executed; and in Wallachia, until quite lately, they were regarded as slaves or beasts of burden, and bought and sold like any other marketable animal. Thus a Bucharest newspaper of 1845 advertises for sale two hundred gypsy families, to be disposed of in batches of five families—a handsome deduction being offered to wholesale purchasers. In Moldavia, up to 1825, a master who killed one of his own gypsies was never punished by law, but only if he killed one which was the property of another man—the crime in that case not being considered to be murder, but merely injury to another man’s property.