According to Eilert Sundt, who devoted his life to studying the Fanten and Tataren, or vagabonds and Gipsies of Sweden and Norway, there is a horrible and ghastly semblance among them of something like a religion, current in Scandinavia.  Once a year, by night, the Gipsies of that country assemble for the purpose of un-baptizing all of their children whom they have, during the year, suffered to be baptized for the sake of gifts, by the Gorgios.  On this occasion, amid wild orgies, they worship a small idol, which is preserved until the next meeting with the greatest secresy and care by their captain.  I must declare that this story seems very doubtful to me.

I have devoted this chapter to illustrating from different points the fact that there lives in England a race which has given its impress to a vast proportion of our vagabond population, and which is more curious and more radically distinct in all its characteristics, than our writers, with one or two exceptions, have ever understood.  One extraordinary difference still remains to be pointed out—­as it has, in fact, already been, with great acumen, by Mr George Borrow, in his “Gipsies in Spain,” and by Dr Alexander Paspati, in his “Etudes sur les Tchinghianes ou Bohemiens de l’Empire Ottoman” (Constantinople, 1870); also by Mr Bright, in his “Hungary,” and by Mr Simson.  It is this, that in every part of the world it is extremely difficult to get Rommany words, even from intelligent gipsies, although they may be willing with all their heart to communicate them.  It may seem simple enough to the reader to ask a man “How do you call ‘to carry’ in your language?” But can the reader understand that a man, who is possibly very much shrewder than himself in reading at a glance many phases of character, and in countless trickeries, should be literally unable to answer such a question?  And yet I have met with many such.  The truth is, that there are people in this world who never had such a thing as an abstract idea, let us say even of an apple, plumped suddenly at them—­not once in all their lives—­and, when it came, the unphilosophical mind could no more grasp it, than the gentleman mentioned by G. H. Lewes (History of Philosophy), could grasp the idea of substance without attribute as presented by Berkeley.  The real Gipsy could talk about apples all day, but the sudden demand for the unconnected word, staggers him—­at least, until he has had some practice in this, to him, new process.  And it is so with other races.  Professor Max Muller once told me in conversation, as nearly as I can recollect, that the Mohawk Indian language is extremely rich in declension, every noun having some sixteen or seventeen inflexions of case, but no nominative.  One can express one’s relations to a father to a most extraordinary extent, among the dilapidated descendants of that once powerful tribe.  But such a thing as the abstract idea of a father, or of ‘father’ pur et simple, never entered the Mohawk mind, and this is very like the Gipsies.