reigned, having abdicated in favour of the Son, while the husband
declared that the Great older God died long ago, and that the world was
now governed by the little God who was, however, not the son of his
predecessor, but of a poor carpenter.

I have never heard of any such nonsense among the English wandering
Gipsies with regard to Christianity, but at the same time I must admit
that their ideas of what the Bible contains are extremely vague. One day
I was sitting with an old Gipsy, discussing Rommany matters, when he
suddenly asked me what the word was in the _waver temmeny jib_, or
foreign Gipsy, for The Seven Stars.

"That would be," I said, "the _Efta Sirnie_. I suppose your name for it
is the Hefta Pens. There is a story that once they were seven sisters,
but one of them was lost, and so they are called seven to this day--though
there are only six. And their right name is the Pleiades."

"That _gudlo_--that story," replied the gipsy, "is like the one of the
Seven Whistlers, which you know is in the Scriptures."

"What!"

"At least they told me so; that the Seven Whistlers are seven spirits of
ladies who fly by night, high in the air, like birds. And it says in the
Bible that once on a time one got lost, and never came back again, and
now the six whistles to find her. But people calls 'em the Seven
Whistlers--though there are only six--exactly the same as in your story
of the stars."

"It's queer," resumed my Gipsy, after a pause, "how they always tells