n of being put to death. Those who were
baptized were great lords in their own country, and had a king and queen
there. Soon after their conversion, the Saracens overran the country,
and obliged them to renounce Christianity. When the Emperor of Germany,
the King of Poland, and other Christian princes heard of this, they fell
upon them, and obliged the whole of them, both great and small, to quit
the country, and go to the Pope at Rome, who enjoined them seven years'
penance to wander over the world, without lying in a bed. They had been
wandering five years when they came to Paris first.... Nearly all of
them had their ears bored, and wore two silver rings in each.... The men
were black, their hair curled; the women remarkably black, their only
clothes a large old duffle garment, tied over the shoulders with a
cloth or cord, and under it a miserable rocket;... notwithstanding
their poverty, there were among them women who, by looking into people's
hands, told their fortunes, and what was worse, they picked people's
pockets of their money, and got it into their own, by telling these
things through airy magic, et cetera." Pasquier remarks upon this
singular journal that however the story of a penance savours of a trick,
these people wandered up and down France, under the eye, and with the
knowledge, of the magistrates, for more than a hundred years; and it was
not till 1561, that a sentence of banishment was passed against them
in that kingdom. The arrival of the Egyptians (as these singular people
were called) in various parts of Europe, corresponds with the period in
which Timur or Tamerlane invaded Hindostan, affording its natives the
choice between the Koran and death. There can be little doubt that
these wanderers consisted originally of the Hindostanee tribes, who,
displaced, and flying from the sabres of the Mohammedans, undertook this
species of wandering life, without well knowing whither they were going.
When they are in closest contact with the ordinary peasants around
them, they still keep their language a mystery. There is little doubt,
however, that it is a dialect of the Hindostanee, from the specimens
produced by Grellman, Hoyland, and others, who have written on the
subject. S.]

The manner in which Quentin Durward had been educated was not of a kind
to soften the heart, or perhaps to improve the moral feeling. He, with
the rest of his family, had been trained to the chase as an amusement,
and taught to