ult for a Slav to become a poet; he takes in poetic
sentiment as a river does water from its source. The first sounds he is
conscious of are the words of his mother singing to him as she rocks his
cradle. Then, as she watches the dawning of intelligence in his infant
face, her mother language is that of poetry, which she improvises at the
moment, and though he never saw the flowers nor the snow-capped
mountains, nor the flowing streams and rivers, he describes them out of
his inner consciousness, and the influence which the varied sounds of
nature have upon his mind."

Rock and river and greenwood tree, sweet-spiced spring flower, rustling
grass, and bird-singing nature and freedom,--this is the secret of the
poets' song and of the Romany, and there is no other mystery in either.
He who sleeps on graves rises mad or a poet; all who lie on the earth,
which is the grave and cradle of nature, and who live _al fresco_,
understand gypsies as well as my lady Britannia Lee. Nay, when some
natures take to the Romany they become like the Norman knights of the
Pale, who were more Paddyfied than the Paddies themselves. These become
leaders among the gypsies, who recognize the fact that one renegade is
more zealous than ten Turks. As for the "mystery" of the history of the
gypsies, it is time, sweet friends, that 't were ended. When we know
that there is to-day, in India, a sect and set of Vauriens, who are there
considered Gipsissimae, and who call themselves, with their wives and
language and being, Rom, Romni, and Romnipana, even as they do in
England; and when we know, moreover, that their faces proclaim them to be
Indian, and that they have been a wandering caste since the dawn of Hindu
history, we have, I trow, little more to seek. As for the rest, you may
read it in the great book of Out-of Doors, _capitulo nullo folio nigro_,
or wherever you choose to open it, written as distinctly, plainly, and
sweetly as the imprint of a school-boy's knife and fork on a mince-pie,
or in the uprolled rapture of the eyes of Britannia when she inhaleth the
perfume of a fresh bunch of Florentine violets. _Ite missa est_.

GYPSIES IN THE EAST.

Noon in Cairo.

A silent old court-yard, half sun and half shadow in which quaintly
graceful, strangely curving columns seem to have taken from long
companionship with trees something of their inner life, while the palms,
their neighbors, from long in-door existence, look as if they h