of
the "Huns," they generally meant the Germans, and not the fierce,
half-savage little men who followed their famous chief Attila,
plundering and burning through Europe about fifteen centuries ago.

Another name with a somewhat similar meaning is _assassin_, which most
people would not guess to have ever been the name of a collection of
people. An assassin is a person who arranges beforehand to take some
one by surprise and kill him. But the original assassins were an
Eastern people who believed that the murder of people of a religion
other than their own was pleasing to their God. The Arabs first called
this sect by the name _hashshash_, which the scholars of the Middle
Ages translated into the Latin _assassinus_. The Arab name was given
because these people were great eaters of "hashish" or dry herbs.

The name _Arab_ itself has come to be used with a special meaning
which has nothing to do with the people whose name it is. A rough
little boy who spends most of his time in the streets is described as
a "street Arab," and this comes from the fact that we think of the
Arabs as a wandering people. The "street Arab" is a wanderer also, of
another sort.

Another name of a wandering people has also come to have a special
meaning in English. The French word for gipsy is _bohemien_, and from
this we have the English word _Bohemian_. When we say a person is "a
Bohemian," we mean that he lives in the way he really likes, and does
not care whether other people think he is quite respectable or not.
It was the novelist Thackeray who first used the word _Bohemian_ in
this sense.

_Bohemia_ is, of course, the name of a country in Germany, but it is
also used figuratively to describe the region or community in which
"Bohemian" or unconventional people live.

The word _gipsy_ itself is used to describe a very dark person, or
almost any kind of people travelling round the country in caravans.
But _gipsy_ really means "Egyptian." When the real gipsies first
appeared in England, in the sixteenth century, people thought they
came from Egypt, and so gave them this name.

Another name often given to very dark people is _blackamoor_, a name
by which negroes are sometimes described. This really means "Black
Moor," and shows us how confused the people who first used the word
were about different races of people. The Moors were a quite different
people from the negroes, being related to the Arabs. But to some
people every one who is n