ed; but his wives, who had accompanied him, were all anxious
to share in the merit of the holy undertaking; and in a council of
the chiefs held after his death, the opinions of these amiable
princesses prevailed that the two hundred millions of Chinese ought
still to be sent to 'the abyss of hell', since it had been the
earnest wish of their deceased husband, and must undoubtedly have
been the will of God, to send them thither without delay. Fortunately
quarrels soon arose among his sons and grandsons about the
succession, and the army recrossed the Jaxartes, still over the ice,
in the beginning of April, and China was saved from this scourge.
Such was Timur the Lame, the man whose greatness and goodness are to
live in the hearts of the people of India, nine-tenths of whom are
Hindoos, and to fill them with overflowing love and gratitude towards
his descendants.

In this brief sketch will perhaps be found the true history of the
origin of the gipsies, the tide of whose immigration began to flow
over all parts of Europe immediately after the return of Timur from
India. The hundreds of thousands of slaves which his army brought
from India in men, women, and children, were cast away when they got
as many as they liked from the more beautiful and polished
inhabitants of the cities of Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and
Georgia, which were all, one after the other, treated in the same
manner as Delhi had been. The Tartar soldiers had no time to settle
down and employ them as they intended for their convenience; they
were marched off to ravage Western Asia in October, 1399, about three
months after their return from India. Timur reached Samarkand in the
middle of May, but he had gone on in advance of his army, which did
not arrive for some time after. Being cast off, the slaves from India
spread over those countries which were most likely to afford them the
means of subsistence as beggars; for they knew nothing of the
manners, the arts, or the language of those among whom they were
thrown; and as Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Anatolia, Georgia,
Circassia, and Russia, had been, or were being, desolated by the army
of this Tartar chief, they passed into Egypt and Bulgaria, whence
they spread over all other countries. Scattered over the face of
these countries, they found small parties of vagrants who were from
the same regions as themselves, who spoke the same language, and who
had in all probability been drawn away by the same mean