nded to teach the lesson of freedom and nature.
Never were such lessons more needed than at present. I do not say that
culture is opposed to the perception of nature; I would show with all my
power that the higher our culture the more we are really qualified to
appreciate beauty and freedom. But gates must be opened for this, and
unfortunately the gates as yet are very few, while Philistinism in every
form makes it a business of closing every opening to the true fairy-land
of delight.

The gypsy is one of many links which connect the simple feeling of nature
with romance. During the Middle Ages thousands of such links and symbols
united nature with religion. Thus Conrad von Wurtzburg tells in his
"Goldene Schmiede" that the parrot which shines in fairest grass-green
hue, and yet like common grass is never wet, sets forth the Virgin, who
bestowed on man an endless spring, and yet remained unchanged. So the
parrot and grass and green and shimmering light all blended in the ideal
of the immortal Maid-Mother, and so the bird appears in pictures by Van
Eyck and Durer. To me the gypsy-parrot and green grass in lonely lanes
and the rain and sunshine all mingle to set forth the inexpressible
purity and sweetness of the virgin parent, Nature. For the gypsy is
parrot-like, a quaint pilferer, a rogue in grain as in green; for green
was his favorite garb in olden time in England, as it is to-day in
Germany, where he who breaks the Romany law may never dare on heath to
wear that fatal fairy color.

These words are the key to the following book, in which I shall set forth
a few sketches taken during my rambles among the Romany. The day is
coming when there will be no more wild parrots nor wild wanderers, no
wild nature, and certainly no gypsies. Within a very few years in the
city of Philadelphia, the English sparrow, the very cit and cad of birds,
has driven from the gardens all the wild, beautiful feathered creatures
whom, as a boy, I knew. The fire-flashing scarlet tanager and the
humming-bird, the yellow-bird, blue-bird, and golden oriole, are now
almost forgotten, or unknown to city children. So the people of
self-conscious culture and the mart and factory are banishing the wilder
sort, and it is all right, and so it must be, and therewith _basta_. But
as a London reviewer said when I asserted in a book that the child was
perhaps born who would see the last gypsy, "Somehow we feel sorry for
that child."

THE