completed his design.’  Thus Timur the Lame had the merit, beyond all question of doubt, of sending to the abyss of hell two hundred millions of men, women, and children, for not believing in a certain book of which they had never heard or read; for the Tartars had not become Muhammadans when they conquered China in the beginning of the thirteenth century.  Indeed, the amiable and profound historian is of opinion, after the most mature deliberation, that ’God himself must have arranged all this in favour of so great and good a prince; and knowing that his end was nigh, inspired him with the idea of undertaking this enterprise, that he might have the merit of having completed it; otherwise, how should he have thought of leading out his army in the dead of winter to cross countries covered with ice and snow?’

The heir to the throne, the Prince Pir Muhammad, was absent when Timur died; but his wives, who had accompanied him, were all anxious to share in the merit of the holy undertaking; and in a council of the chiefs held after his death, the opinions of these amiable princesses prevailed that the two hundred millions of Chinese ought still to be sent to ‘the abyss of hell’, since it had been the earnest wish of their deceased husband, and must undoubtedly have been the will of God, to send them thither without delay.  Fortunately quarrels soon arose among his sons and grandsons about the succession, and the army recrossed the Jaxartes, still over the ice, in the beginning of April, and China was saved from this scourge.  Such was Timur the Lame, the man whose greatness and goodness are to live in the hearts of the people of India, nine-tenths of whom are Hindoos, and to fill them with overflowing love and gratitude towards his descendants.

In this brief sketch will perhaps be found the true history of the origin of the gipsies, the tide of whose immigration began to flow over all parts of Europe immediately after the return of Timur from India.  The hundreds of thousands of slaves which his army brought from India in men, women, and children, were cast away when they got as many as they liked from the more beautiful and polished inhabitants of the cities of Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and Georgia, which were all, one after the other, treated in the same manner as Delhi had been.  The Tartar soldiers had no time to settle down and employ them as they intended for their convenience; they were marched off to ravage Western Asia in October, 1399, about three months after their return from India.  Timur reached Samarkand in the middle of May, but he had gone on in advance of his army, which did not arrive for some time after.  Being cast off, the slaves from India spread over those countries which were most likely to afford them the means of subsistence as beggars; for they knew nothing of the manners, the arts, or the language of those among whom they were thrown; and as Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Anatolia, Georgia, Circassia, and Russia, had been, or were