I have never heard of any such nonsense among the English wandering Gipsies with regard to Christianity, but at the same time I must admit that their ideas of what the Bible contains are extremely vague.  One day I was sitting with an old Gipsy, discussing Rommany matters, when he suddenly asked me what the word was in the waver temmeny jib, or foreign Gipsy, for The Seven Stars.

“That would be,” I said, “the Efta Sirnie.  I suppose your name for it is the Hefta Pens.  There is a story that once they were seven sisters, but one of them was lost, and so they are called seven to this day—­though there are only six.  And their right name is the Pleiades.”

“That gudlo—­that story,” replied the gipsy, “is like the one of the Seven Whistlers, which you know is in the Scriptures.”

“What!”

“At least they told me so; that the Seven Whistlers are seven spirits of ladies who fly by night, high in the air, like birds.  And it says in the Bible that once on a time one got lost, and never came back again, and now the six whistles to find her.  But people calls ’em the Seven Whistlers—­though there are only six—­exactly the same as in your story of the stars.”

“It’s queer,” resumed my Gipsy, after a pause, “how they always tells these here stories by Sevens.  Were you ever on Salisbury Plain?”

“No!”

“There are great stones there—­bori bars—­and many a night I’ve slept there in the moonlight, in the open air, when I was a boy, and listened to my father tellin’ me about the Baker.  For there’s seven great stories, and they say that hundreds of years ago a baker used to come with loaves of bread, and waste it all a tryin’ to make seven loaves remain at the same place, one on each stone.  But one all’us fell off, and to this here day he’s never yet been able to get all seven on the seven stones.”

I think that my Gipsy told this story in connection with that of the Whistlers, because he was under the impression that it also was of Scriptural origin.  It is, however, really curious that the Gipsy term for an owlet is the Maromengro’s Chavi, or Baker’s Daughter, and that they are all familiar with the monkish legend which declares that Jesus, in a baker’s shop, once asked for bread.  The mistress was about to give him a large cake, when her daughter declared it was too much, and diminished the gift by one half.

         “He nothing said,
   But by the fire laid down the bread,
   When lo, as when a blossom blows—­
   To a vast loaf the manchet rose;
   In angry wonder, standing by,
   The girl sent forth a wild, rude cry,
   And, feathering fast into a fowl,
   Flew to the woods a wailing owl.”