he Bazeegars of
Calcutta, or are descended from the robbers of the Indus, or are
identical with the Nuts and Djatts of Northern India, has not been
ascertained with any degree of certainty. The Gyptologists are not yet
agreed upon the ancestry of this ancient but obscure race, and possibly
they never will be. We know, however, that the Gipsies have wandered up
and down Europe since the eleventh century, if not from a still earlier
period, and that they have preserved their Bohemian characteristics,
their language--which is a sort of daughter of the old Sanscrit--their
traditions, and the mysteries of their religion during a long career of
restless movement and frequent persecution. And they have kept, too,
their indolent, and not too creditable habits. Early in the twelfth
century an Austrian monk described them as 'Ishmaelites and braziers, who
go peddling through the wide world, having neither house, nor home,
cheating the people with their tricks, and deceiving mankind, but not
openly.' That description would hold good at the present day. The
Gipsies are still a lazy, thieving set of rogues, who get their living by
robbing hen-roosts, telling fortunes, and 'snapping up unconsidered
trifles' like Autolycus of old. Pilfering, varied with a rude sort of
magic, and the swindling arts of divination and chiromancy for the
special behoof of credulous servant-girls, are the stock-in-trade of the
modern Zingaris. Without education, and without industry, they transmit
their vagrant habits to generation after generation, and perpetuate all
the vices of a lawless and nomadic life.

"It is very easy to give a romantic and even a sentimental colouring to
the wandering Romany. The 'greenwood home,' with its freedom from all
the restraints of a conventional state of society, is not without its
attractive side--in books and in ballads. Minor poets have told us that
'the Gipsy's life is a joyous life,' and plays and operas have been
written to illustrate the superiority of vagabondage over civilisation.
But the pretty Gitana of the stage is altogether a different sort of
being from the brown-faced, elf-locked, and tawdrily dressed female who
haunts back entries with the ostensible object of selling clothes-pegs,
but with the real motive of picking up whatever may be lying in her way.
There is but small chance of Bohemian Girls finding themselves in
drawing-rooms nowadays. The last experiment of the kind was made by the
writ