what is
asserted of the young Gipsy girls rambling about with their fathers, who
are musicians, dancing with lascivious and indecent gesture to divert any
person who is willing to give them a small gratuity for so acting, is
likewise perfectly Indian." Sonneratt confirms this in the account he
gives of the dancing girls of Surat. Fortune-telling is practised all
over the East, but the peculiar kind professed by the Gipsies, viz.,
chiromancy, constantly referring to whether the parties shall be rich or
poor, happy or unhappy in marriage, &c., is nowhere met with but in
India. Sonneratt says:--"The Indian smith carries his tools, his shop,
and his forge about with him, and works in any place where he can find
employment. He has a stone instead of an anvil, and his whole apparatus
is a pair of tongs, a hammer, a beetle, and a file. This is very much
like Gipsy tinkers," &c. It is usual for Parias, or Suders, in India to
have their huts outside the villages of other castes. This is one of the
leading features of the Gipsies of this country. A visit to the
outskirts of London, where the Gipsies encamp, will satisfy any one upon
this point, viz., that our Gipsies are Indians. In isolated cases a
strong religious feeling has manifested itself in certain persons of the
Bunyan type of character and countenance--a strong frame, with large,
square, massive forehead, such as Bunyan possessed; for it should be
noted that John Bunyan was a Gipsy tinker, with not an improbable mixture
of the blood of an Englishman in his veins, and, as a rule, persons of
this mixture become powerful for good or evil. A case in point, viz.,
Mrs. Simpson and her family, has come under my own observation lately,
which forcibly illustrates my meaning, both as regards the evil Mrs.
Simpson did in the former part of her life, and for the last twenty years
in her efforts to do good among persons of her class, and also among
others, as she has travelled about the country. The exodus of the
Gipsies from India may be set down, first, to famine, of which India, as
we all know, suffers so much periodically; second, to the insatiable love
of gold and plunder bound up in the nature of the Gipsies--the West, from
an Indian point of view, is always looked upon as a land of gold, flowing
with milk and honey; third, the hatred the Gipsies have for wars, and as
in the years of 1408 and 1409, and many years previous to these dates,
India experienced some terrib