“What a country America must be,” quoth Pirengro, the Walker, to me, on the occasion just referred to.  “Why, my pal, who’s just welled apopli from dovo tem—­(my brother, who has just returned from that country), tells me that when a cow or anything dies there, they just chuck it away, and nobody ask a word for any of it.”  “What would you do,” he continued, “if you were in the fields and had nothing to eat?”

I replied, “that if any could be found, I should hunt for fern-roots.”

“I could do better than that,” he said.  “I should hunt for a hotchewitchi,—­a hedge-hog,—­and I should be sure to find one; there’s no better eating.”

Whereupon assuming his left hand to be an imaginary hedge-hog, he proceeded to score and turn and dress it for ideal cooking with a case-knife.

“And what had you for dinner to-day?” I inquired.

“Some cocks’ heads.  They’re very fine—­very fine indeed!”

Now it is curious but true that there is no person in the world more particular as to what he eats than the half-starved English or Irish peasant, whose sufferings have so often been set forth for our condolence.  We may be equally foolish, you and I—­in fact chemistry proves it—­when we are disgusted at the idea of feeding on many things which mere association and superstition render revolting.  But the old fashioned gipsy has none of these qualms—­he is haunted by no ghost of society—­save the policeman, he knows none of its terrors.  Whatever is edible he eats, except horse-meat; wherever there is an empty spot he sleeps; and the man who can do this devoid of shame, without caring a pin for what the world says—­nay, without even knowing that he does not care, or that he is peculiar—­is independent to a degree which of itself confers a character which is not easy to understand.

I grew up as a young man with great contempt for Helvetius, D’Holbach, and all the French philosophers of the last century, whose ideal man was a perfect savage; but I must confess that since I have studied gipsy nature, my contempt has changed into wonder where they ever learned in their salons and libraries enough of humanity to theorise so boldly, and with such likeness to truth, as they did.  It is not merely in the absolute out-of-doors independence of the old-fashioned Gipsy, freer than any wild beast from care for food, that his resemblance to a “philosopher” consists, or rather to the ideal man, free from imaginary cares.  For more than this, be it for good or for evil, the real Gipsy has, unlike all other men, unlike the lowest savage, positively no religion, no tie to a spiritual world, no fear of a future, nothing but a few trifling superstitions and legends, which in themselves indicate no faith whatever in anything deeply seated.  It would be difficult, I think, for any highly civilised man, who had not studied Thought deeply, and in a liberal spirit, to approach in the