ions had passed, the puppy with a taint of the wolf's blood in it
would never come straight to its master's feet, but always approach him
in a semicircle. Not Kuhleborhn nor Undine herself is less susceptible
of alien culture than the pure-blooded Gipsy. We can domesticate the
goose, we can tame the goldfinch and the linnet; but we shall never
reclaim the guinea-fowl, or accustom the swallow to a cage. Teach the
Gipsy to read, or even to write; he remains a Gipsy still. His love of
wandering is as keen as is the instinct of a migratory bird for its
annual passage; and exactly as the prisoned cuckoo of the first year will
beat itself to death against its bars when September draws near, so the
Gipsy, even when most prosperous, will never so far forsake the
traditions of his tribe as to stay long in any one place. His mind is
not as ours. A little of our civilisation we can teach him, and he will
learn it, as he may learn to repeat by rote the signs of the zodiac or
the multiplication table, or to use a table napkin, or to decorously
dispose of the stones in a cherry tart. But the lesson sits lightly on
him, and he remains in heart as irreclaimable as ever. Already, indeed,
our Gipsies are leaving us. They are not dying out, it is true. They
are making their way to the Far West, where land is not yet enclosed,
where game is not property, where life is free, and where there is always
and everywhere room to 'hatch the tan' or put up the tent. Romany will,
in all human probability, be spoken on the other side of the Atlantic
years after the last traces of it have vanished from amongst ourselves.
We begin even now to miss the picturesque aspects of Gipsy life--the
tent, the strange dress, the nomadic habits. English Gipsies are no
longer pure and simple vagrants. They are tinkers, or scissor-grinders,
or basket-makers, or travel from fair to fair with knock-'em-downs, or
rifle galleries, or itinerant shows. Often they have some ostensible
place of residence. But they preserve their inner life as carefully as
the Jews in Spain, under the searching persecution of the Inquisition,
preserved their faith for generation upon generation; and even now it is
a belief that when, for the sake of some small kindness or gratuity, a
Gipsy woman has allowed her child to be baptised, she summons her
friends, and attempts to undo the effect of the ceremony by subjecting
the infant to some weird, horrible incantation of Eastern orig