the hut were closely scanned to judge from their appearance if they were
well fed, and of a charitable disposition. It is a melancholy thing to
recall; but it is absolutely necessary for a thinker to have once lived
such a life, that he may be able to understand what is the intellectual
status of those fellow beings whose whole life is simply a hunt for
enough food to sustain life, and enough beer to cheer it.

I have spoken of the Gipsy fondness for the hedgehog. Richard Liebich,
in his book, _Die Zigeuner in ihrem Wesen und in ihrer Sprache_, tells
his readers that the only indication of a belief in a future state which
he ever detected in an old Gipsy woman, was that she once dreamed she was
in heaven. It appeared to her as a large garden, full of fine fat
hedgehogs. "This is," says Mr Liebich, "unquestionably very earthly, and
dreamed very sensuously; reminding us of Mahommed's paradise, which in
like manner was directed to the animal and not to the spiritual nature,
only that here were hedgehogs and there houris."

Six or seven thousand years of hungry-marauding, end by establishing
strange points of difference between the mind of a Gipsy and a well-to-do
citizen. It has starved God out of the former; he inherited unbelief
from his half fed Pariah ancestors, and often retains it, even in
England, to this day, with many other unmistakable signs of his Eastern-
jackal origin. And strange as it may seem to you, reader, his
intercourse with Christians has all over Europe been so limited, that he
seldom really knows what religion is. The same Mr Liebich tells us that
one day he overheard a Gipsy disputing with his wife as to what was the
true character of the belief of the Gentiles. Both admitted that there
was a great elder grown up God (the _baro puro dewel_), and a smaller
younger God (the _tikno tarno dewel_). But the wife maintained,
appealing to Mr Liebich for confirmation, that the great God no longer