the towns,
where, to the original bad traits of their character, they have
superadded the evil and vicious habits of the rabble. . . . They listened
with admiration, but alas, not of the truths, the eternal truths I was
telling them, but at finding that their broken jargon could be written
and read; the only words of assent to the heavenly doctrine which I ever
obtained, and which were rather of the negative kind, were the following,
from a woman--'Brother! you tell us strange things, though perhaps you do
not lie; a month since I would sooner have believed these tales than that
I should this day have seen one who could write Rommany.' . . ."

He preserves the clergyman, but deepens the Gypsy stain. The "Athenaeum"
was "not at liberty on this occasion" to publish the name of this man
whom Gypsies called "Brother," but apparently it would not be the name of
any writer hitherto known to readers of the "Athenaeum."

He was a month in England, and then left for Spain to print and
distribute Testaments. He had hardly put his feet on Spanish soil than,
said the Marquis of Santa Colona, {137} he "looked round, saw some
Gypsies lounging there, said something that the Marquis could not
understand, and immediately 'that man became _une grappe de Gitanos_.'
They hung round his neck, clung to his knees, seized his hands, kissed
his feet, so that the Marquis hardly liked to join his comrade again,
after such close embraces by so dirty a company." At Cordova he was very
well received by the Gypsies "on the supposition that he was one of their
own race." He says in "The Gypsies of Spain":

"As for myself, I was admitted without scruple to their private meetings,
and was made a participator of their most secret thoughts. During our
intercourse, some remarkable scenes occurred: one night more than twenty
of us, men and women, were assembled in a long low room on the ground
floor, in a dark alley or court in the old gloomy town of Cordova. After
the Gitanos had discussed several jockey plans, and settled some private
bargains amongst themselves, we all gathered round a huge brasero of
flaming charcoal, and began conversing _sobre las cosas de Egypto_, when
I proposed that, as we had no better means of amusing ourselves, we
should endeavour to turn into the Calo language some piece of devotion,
that we might see whether this language, the gradual decay of which I had
frequently heard them lament, was capable of expressing any othe