remarkable, social, and philological facts which are connected with an
immense proportion of our out-of-door population. There are, indeed,
very few people who know, that every time we look from the window into a
crowded street, the chances are greatly in favour of the assertion, that
we shall see at least one man who bears in his memory some hundreds of
Sanscrit roots, and that man English born; though it was probably in the
open air, and English bred, albeit his breeding was of the roads.

For go where you will, though you may not know it, you encounter at every
step, in one form or the other, _the Rommany_. True, the dwellers in
tents are becoming few and far between, because the "close cultivation"
of the present generation, which has enclosed nearly all the waste land
in England, has left no spot in many a day's journey, where "the
travellers," as they call themselves, can light the fire and boil the
kettle undisturbed. There is almost "no tan to hatch," or place to stay
in. So it has come to pass, that those among them who cannot settle down
like unto the Gentiles, have gone across the Great Water to America,
which is their true Canaan, where they flourish mightily, the more
enterprising making a good thing of it, by _prastering graias_ or
"running horses," or trading in them, while the idler or more moral ones,
pick up their living as easily as a mouse in a cheese, on the endless
roads and in the forests. And so many of them have gone there, that I am
sure the child is now born, to whom the sight of a real old-fashioned
gipsy will be as rare in England as a Sioux or Pawnee warrior in the
streets of New York or Philadelphia. But there is a modified and yet
real Rommany-dom, which lives and will live with great vigour, so long as
a regularly organised nomadic class exists on our roads--and it is the
true nature and inner life of this class which has remained for ages, an
impenetrable mystery to the world at large. A member of it may be a
tramp and a beggar, the proprietor of some valuable travelling show, a