of a minister--a _natural_ daughter, you know: my
father was the most powerful preacher in all the south, and I always
went to hear him." In about an hour after, however, forgetting her
extemporary sally, and the reverend character with which she had
insisted her sire, she spoke of him, in another equally palpable
invention, as the greatest "king of the gipsies" that the gipsies ever
had. Even the children had caught this habit of monstrous mendacity.
There was one of the boys of the band, considerably under twelve, who
could extemporize lying narratives by the hour, and seemed always
delighted to get a listener; and a little girl, younger still, who
"lisped in _fiction_, for the _fiction_ came." There were two things
that used to strike me as peculiar among these gipsies--a Hindu type of
head, small of size, but with a considerable fulness of forehead,
especially along the medial line, in the region, as the phrenologist
would perhaps say, of _individuality_ and _comparison_; and a singular
posture assumed by the elderly females of the tribe in squatting before
their fires, in which the elbow rested on the knees brought close
together, the chin on the palms, and the entire figure (somewhat
resembling in attitude a Mexican mummy) assumed an outlandish
appearance, that reminded me of some of the more grotesque sculptures of
Egypt and Hindustan. The peculiar type of head was derived, I doubt not,
from an ancestry originally different from that of the settled races of
the country; nor is it impossible that the peculiar position--unlike any
I have ever seen Scottish females assume--was also of foreign origin.

I have witnessed scenes among these gipsies, of which the author of the
"Jolly Beggars" might have made rare use, but which formed a sort of
materials that I lacked the special ability rightly to employ. It was
reported on one occasion that a marriage ceremony and wedding were to
take place in the cave, and I sauntered the way, in the hope of
ascertaining how its inmates contrived to do for themselves what of
course no clergyman could venture to do for them--seeing that, of the
parties to be united, the bridegroom might have already as many wives
living as "Peter Bell," and the bride as many husbands. A gipsy marriage
had taken place a few years previous in a cave near Rosemarkie. An old
male gipsy, possessed of the rare accomplishment of reading, had
half-read, half-spelled the English marriage-service to the young
co