“As long as there are poorer people than yourself in the world, thank God even if you go about with bare feet.” “When the bridge is gone, then even the narrowest plank becomes precious.” “Only the deaf and the blind are obliged to believe.” “Bacon makes bold.” “After misfortune comes fortune.” “Who has got luck need only sit at home with his mouth open.” “Never despair of your luck, for it needs only a moment to bring it.” * * * * * There is no such thing as a gypsy church, and a legend current in Transylvania explains the reason of this: “Once upon a time,” so it runs, “the Tziganes had a right good church, solidly built of brick and stone like other churches. The Wallachs, who had neither stones nor bricks, had at that same time built themselves a church out of cheese and bacon, with sausage rafters and pancake roof. “This building filled the greedy Tziganes with envy, causing them to lick their lips whenever they passed that way, and at last they proposed an exchange of churches to the Wallachs, who gladly accepted the bargain. But when the winter came the hungry Tziganes began to nibble at the pancake roof of their church; next they attacked the rafters, and there soon remained nothing more of the whole building. That is why since that time there has never been a Tzigane church, and why the gypsies, whenever they go to any place of worship at all, prefer to go to the Roumanian church, because, as they say, they like to remember that it once belonged to them.” This story has passed into a proverb, used to describe a man without religion, by saying, “He eats his faith, as the gypsies ate their church.” Their religion is of the vaguest description. They generally agree as to the existence of a God, but it is a God whom they fear without loving. “God cannot be good,” they say, “or else he would not make us die.” The devil they also believe in to a certain extent, but consider him to be a weak, silly fellow, incapable of doing much harm. A Tzigane, questioned as to whether he believed in the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body, scoffed at the idea. “How could I be so foolish as to believe this?” he said, with unconscious philosophy. “We have been quite wretched enough and wicked enough in this world already. Why should we begin again in another?” Sometimes their confused notions of Christianity take the form of believing in a God, and in his Son the young God; but while many are of opinion that the old God is dead, and that his Son now reigns in his place, others declare the old God to be not really dead, but merely to have abdicated in favor of his Son. Others, again, suppose this latter to be not really the Son of the old God, but only that of a poor carpenter, and are wont to say contemptuously that “the carpenter’s son has usurped the throne.”