heads imaginable.  In some of the large Andalusian towns certain of the gipsy girls, somewhat better looking than their fellows, will take more care of their personal appearance.  These go out and earn money by performing dances strongly resembling those forbidden at our public balls in carnival time.  An English missionary, Mr. Borrow, the author of two very interesting works on the Spanish gipsies, whom he undertook to convert on behalf of the Bible Society, declares there is no instance of any gitana showing the smallest weakness for a man not belonging to her own race.  The praise he bestows upon their chastity strikes me as being exceedingly exaggerated.  In the first place, the great majority are in the position of the ugly woman described by Ovid, “Casta quam nemo rogavit.”  As for the pretty ones, they are, like all Spanish women, very fastidious in choosing their lovers.  Their fancy must be taken, and their favour must be earned.  Mr. Borrow quotes, in proof of their virtue, one trait which does honour to his own, and especially to his simplicity:  he declares that an immoral man of his acquaintance offered several gold ounces to a pretty gitana, and offered them in vain.  An Andalusian, to whom I retailed this anecdote, asserted that the immoral man in question would have been far more successful if he had shown the girl two or three piastres, and that to offer gold ounces to a gipsy was as poor a method of persuasion as to promise a couple of millions to a tavern wench.  However that may be, it is certain that the gitana shows the most extraordinary devotion to her husband.  There is no danger and no suffering she will not brave, to help him in his need.  One of the names which the gipsies apply to themselves, Rome, or “the married couple,” seems to me a proof of their racial respect for the married state.  Speaking generally, it may be asserted that their chief virtue is their patriotism—­if we may thus describe the fidelity they observe in all their relations with persons of the same origin as their own, their readiness to help one another, and the inviolable secrecy which they keep for each other’s benefit, in all compromising matters.  And indeed something of the same sort may be noticed in all mysterious associations which are beyond the pale of the law.

* It has struck me that the German gipsies, though they thoroughly understand the word cale, do not care to be called by that name.  Among themselves they always use the designation Romane tchave.

Some months ago, I paid a visit to a gipsy tribe in the Vosges country.  In the hut of an old woman, the oldest member of the tribe, I found a gipsy, in no way related to the family, who was sick of a mortal disease.  The man had left a hospital, where he was well cared for, so that he might die among his own people.  For thirteen weeks he had been lying in bed in their encampment, and receiving far better treatment than any of the sons and sons-in-law who