air
O'er sorrow and sin and wintry deeps of Death;
But where stood He? Beside our Sinfi there,
Remembering childish tears in Nazareth.

Perhaps Borrow's pictures of the gypsies, by omitting to depict the
Romany woman on her loftier, her tragic side, fail to demonstrate what he
well knew to be the Romany's great racial mark of distinction all over
Europe, the enormous superiority of the gypsy women over the gypsy men,
not in intelligence merely, but in all the higher human qualities. While
it is next to impossible to imagine a gypsy hero, gypsy heroines--women
capable of the noblest things--are far from uncommon.

The "Amazonian Sinfi," alluded to in Dr. Hake's sonnet, was a heroine of
this noble strain, and yet perhaps she was but a type of a certain kind
of Romany chi.

It was she of the bantam cock and "the left-hand body blow" alluded to
above.

This same gypsy girl also illustrated another side of the variously
endowed character of the Romany women, ignored, or almost ignored by
Borrow--their passion for music. The daughter of an extremely well-to-do
"gryengro," or dealer in horses, this gypsy girl had travelled over
nearly all England, and was familiar with London, where, in the studio of
a certain romantic artist, she was in great request as a face-model. But
having been brought into close contact with a travelling band of
Hungarian gypsy musicians who visited England some years ago, she
developed a passion for music that showed her to be a musical genius.
The gypsy musicians of Hungary, who are darker than the tented gypsies,
are the most intelligent and most widely-travelled of even Hungarian
gypsies--indeed, of all the Romany race, and with them Sinfi soon
developed into the "Fiddling Sinfi," who was famous in Wales and also in
East Anglia, and the East Midlands. After a while she widened her
reputation in a curious way as the only performer on the old Welsh
stringed instrument called the "crwth," or cruth. I told Borrow her
story at Gypsy Ring. Having become, through the good nature of an
eminent Welsh antiquary, the possessor of a crwth, and having discovered
the unique capabilities of that rarely-seen instrument, she soon taught
herself to play upon it with extraordinary effect, fascinating her Welsh
patrons by the ravishing strains she could draw from it. This obsolete
instrument is six-stringed, with two of the strings reaching beyond the
key-board, and a bridge placed, not at r