e faith, the
first man. Red Earth, Adam, was a Jew, and the old claim to be a
peculiar people has been curiously confirmed by the extraordinary genius
and influence of the race, and by their boundless wanderings. Go where
we may, we find the Jew--has any other wandered so far?

Yes, one. For wherever Jew has gone, there, too, we find the gypsy. The
Jew may be more ancient, but even the authentic origin of the Romany is
lost in ancient Aryan record, and, strictly speaking, his is a
prehistoric caste. Among the hundred and fifty wandering tribes of India
and Persia, some of them Turanian, some Aryan, and others mixed, it is of
course difficult to identify the exact origin of the European gypsy. One
thing we know: that from the tenth to the twelfth century, and probably
much later on, India threw out from her northern half a vast multitude of
very troublesome indwellers. What with Buddhist, Brahman, and Mohammedan
wars,--invaders outlawing invaded,--the number of out-_castes_ became
alarmingly great. To these the Jats, who, according to Captain Burton,
constituted the main stock of our gypsies, contributed perhaps half their
entire nation. Excommunication among the Indian professors of
transcendental benevolence meant social death and inconceivable cruelty.
Now there are many historical indications that these outcasts, before
leaving India, became gypsies, which was the most natural thing in a
country where such classes had already existed in very great numbers from
early times. And from one of the lowest castes, which still exists in
India, and is known as the Dom, {19} the emigrants to the West probably
derived their name and several characteristics. The Dom burns the dead,
handles corpses, skins beasts, and performs other functions, all of which
were appropriated by, and became peculiar to, gypsies in several
countries in Europe, notably in Denmark and Holland, for several
centuries after their arrival there. The Dom of the present day also
sells baskets, and wanders with a tent; he is altogether gypsy. It is
remarkable that he, living in a hot climate, drinks ardent spirits to
excess, being by no means a "temperate Hindoo," and that even in extreme
old age his hair seldom turns white, which is a noted peculiarity among
our own gypsies of pure blood. I know and have often seen a gypsy woman,
nearly a hundred years old, whose curling hair is black, or hardly
perceptibly changed. It is extremely probable tha