_Gipsy_, with an air of grief and injury: "I'm sure I was telling the
story for you the best way I knew how!"

Yet this man was far from being a fool. What was it, then? Simply and
solely, a lack of education--of that mental training which even those who
never entered a schoolhouse, receive more or less of, when they so much
as wait patiently for a month behind a chair, or tug for six months at a
plough, or in short, acquire the civilised virtue of Christian patience.
That is it. We often hear in this world that a little education goes a
great way; but to get some idea of the immense value of a very little
education indeed, and the incredible effect it may have upon character,
one should study with gentleness and patience a real Gipsy.

Probably the most universal error in the world is the belief that all
men, due allowance being made for greater or less knowledge, or
"talents," have minds like our own; are endowed with the same moral
perception, and see things on the whole very much as we do. Now the
truth is that a Chinese, whose mind is formed, not by "religion" as we
understand it, but simply by the intense pressure of "Old Custom," which
we do not understand, thinks in a different manner from an European;
moralists accuse him of "moral obliquity," but in reality it is a moral
difference. Docility of mind, the patriarchal principle, and the very
perfection of innumerable wise and moral precepts have, by the practice
of thousands of years, produced in him their natural result. Whenever he
attempts to think, his mind runs at once into some broad and open path,
beautifully bordered with dry artificial flowers, {21} and the result has
been the inability to comprehend any new idea--a state to which the
Church of the Middle Ages, or any too rigidly established system, would
in a few thousand years have reduced humanity. Under the action of
widely different causes, the gipsy has also a different cast of mind from