s_ of Great Britain. They are wanderers without
fixed habitations; whilst, at the same time, they are more abundant in
some parts of the island than others. They have no very definite
occupation; yet they are oftener tinkers and tinmen than aught else
equally legal. They intermarry with the English but little. All this is
_caste_, although we may not exactly call it so. Then, again, they have
a peculiar language, although it is so imperfectly known to the majority
of the British gipsies, as to have become well-nigh extinct.[58] These
gipsies are of Indian origin, and a wandering tribe of Hindostan, called
Sikligurs, reminded Mr. Pickering of the European gipsies more than any
other Indians he fell in with. Like these, the Sikligurs are _coves_, or
tinkers.

This, however, is by the way. Although it is as well to make a note of
the Indian extraction of the English and other European gipsies, it is
not for this reason that they have been mentioned. They find a place
here for the sake of illustrating what is meant by the _wandering tribes
of India_, whilst at the same time they throw a slight illustration over
the nature of _castes_. Lastly, they are essentially parts of an
ethnological investigation--ethnological rather than either social or
political. Their characteristics are referable to a difference of
descent; and they are tinkers, wanderers, poachers, and smugglers, not
so much because they are either gipsies, or Indians, as because they are
of a different stock from the English. They are foreigners in the
fullest sense of the term; and they differ from their fellow-citizens
just as the Jew does--though less advantageously.

Now India swarms with the analogues of the English gipsy; so much so as
to make it likely that the latter is found as far from his original
country as Wales and Norway, simply because he is a vagabond, not
because he is an Indian.

Of the chief of the tribes in question a good account is given by Mr.
Balfour. This list, however, which is as follows, may be enlarged.

1. The _Gohur_ are, perhaps, better known under the name of _Lumbarri_,
and better still as the _Brinjarri_, the bullock-drivers of many parts
of India, but more especially of the Dekhan. They are corn-merchants as
well. Their organization consists of divisions called _Tandas_, at the
head of which is a _Naek_. Two Naeks paramount over the rest, reside
permanently at Hyderabad, on the confines of the Mahratta and Telugu
countrie