Long, loud, and joyously affirmative was the peal of laughter with which
the Gipsies welcomed this characteristic story.

So far as research and the analogy of living tribes of the same race can
establish a fact, it would seem that the Gipsies were, previous to their
quitting India, not people of high caste, but wandering Pariahs,
outcasts, foes to the Brahmins, and unbelievers. All the Pariahs are not
free-thinkers, but in India, the Church, as in Italy, loses no time in
making of all detected free-thinkers Pariahs. Thus we are told, in the
introduction to the English translation of that very curious book, "The
Tales of the Gooroo Simple," which should be read by every scholar, that
all the true literature of the country--that which has life, and freedom,
and humour--comes from the Pariahs. And was it different in those days,
when Rabelais, and Von Hutten, and Giordano Bruno were, in their wise,
Pariahs and Gipsies, roving from city to city, often wanting bread and
dreading fire, but asking for nothing but freedom?

The more I have conversed intimately with Gipsies, the more have I been
struck by the fact, that my mingled experiences of European education and
of life in the Far West of America have given me a basis of mutual
intelligence which had otherwise been utterly wanting. I, myself, have
known in a wild country what it is to be half-starved for many days--to
feel that all my thoughts and intellectual exertions, hour by hour, were
all becoming centered on one subject--how to get something to eat. I
felt what it was to be wolfish and even ravening; and I noted, step by
step, in myself, how a strange sagacity grew within me--an art of
detecting food. It was during the American war, and there were thousands
of us pitifully starved. When we came near some log hut I began at once
to surmise, if I saw a flour sack lying about, that there was a mill not
far distant; perhaps flour or bread in the house; while the dwellers in