an, which he has picked up from time to time, and to which he
holds--much as a child holds to its fairy tales--uncritically and
indifferently. Ethical distinctions are as unknown to him as to a kitten
or a magpie. He is kindly by nature, and always anxious to please those
who treat him well, and to win their affection. But the distinction
between affection and esteem is one which he cannot fathom; and the
precise shade of _meum_ and _tuum_ is as absolutely unintelligible to him
as was the Hegelian antithesis between _nichts_ and _seyn_ to the late
Mr. John Stuart Mill. To make the true Gipsy we have only to add to this
an absolute contempt for all that constitutes civilisation. The Gipsy
feels a house, or indeed anything at all approaching to the idea of a
permanent dwelling, to amount to a positive restraint upon his liberty.
He can live on hedgehog and acorns--though he may prefer a fowl and
potatoes not strictly his own. Wherever a hedge gives shelter he will
roll himself up and sleep. And it is possibly because he has no property
of his own that he is so slow to recognise the rights of property in
others. But above all, his tongue--the weird, corrupt, barbarous
Sanscrit 'patter' or 'jib,' known only to himself and to those of his
blood--is the keynote of his strange life. In spite of every effort that
has been made to fathom it, the Gipsy dialect is still unintelligible to
'Gorgios'--a few experts such as Mr. Borrow alone excepted. But wherever
the true Gipsy goes he carries his tongue with him, and a Romany from
Hungary, ignorant of English as a Chippeway or an Esquimaux, will
'patter' fluently with a Lee, a Stanley, a Locke, or a Holland, from the
English Midlands, and make his 'rukkerben' at once easily understood.
Nor is this all, for there are certain strange old Gipsy customs which
still constitute a freemasonry. The marriage rites of Gipsies are a
definite and very significant ritual. Their funeral ceremonies are
equally remarkable. Not being allowed to burn their dead, they still
burn the dead man's clothes and all his small property, while they mourn
for him by abstaining--often for years--from something of which he was
fond, and by taking the strictest care never to even mention his name.

"What are we to do with children in whom these strange habits and
beliefs, or rather wants of belief, are as much part of their nature as
is their physical organisation? Darwin has told us how, after
generat