religion until he had fallen in love; and at the present day his "faith"
appears to consist in a worship of the great and wise and good among the
dead. I have already spoken of many Gipsies reminding me, by their
entirely unconscious ungodliness, of thorough Hegelians. I may now add,
that, like the Positivists, they seem to correct their irreligion through
the influence of love; and by a strange custom, which is, in spirit and
fact, nothing less than adoring the departed and offering to the dead a
singular sacrifice.

He who has no house finds a home in family and friends, whence it results
that the Gipsy, despite his ferocious quarrels in the clan, and his sharp
practice even with near relations, is--all things considered--perhaps the
most devoted to kith and kin of any one in the world. His very name--rom,
a husband--indicates it. His children, as almost every writer on him,
from Grellmann down to the present day, has observed, are more thoroughly
indulged and spoiled than any non-gipsy can conceive; and despite all the
apparent contradictions caused by the selfishness born of poverty,
irritable Eastern blood, and the eccentricity of semi-civilisation, I
doubt if any man, on the whole, in the world, is more attached to his
own.

It was only three or four hours ago, as I write, on the fifth day of
February 1872, that a Gipsy said to me, "It is nine years since my wife
died, and I would give all Anglaterra to have her again."

That the real religion of the Gipsies, as I have already observed,
consists like that of the Comteists, in devotion to the dead, is
indicated by a very extraordinary custom, which, notwithstanding the very
general decay, of late years, of all their old habits, still prevails
universally. This is the refraining from some usage or indulgence in