I entered one of the huts, in which by the way I could scarcely stand upright, and found there a man employed in making a variety of simple wooden articles for household use.  The gipsies are remarkably clever with their hands; many of these wooden utensils are fashioned very dexterously, and even display some taste.  The gipsy, moreover, is always the best blacksmith in all the country round; and as for their music, I have before spoken of the strange power these people possess of stirring the hearts of their hearers with their pathetic strains.  It has often seemed to me that this marvellous gift of music is, as it were, a language brought with them in their exile from another and a higher state of existence.

That these poor outcasts are capable of noble self-sacrifice, the story I am about to relate will testify.  Not far from this very gipsy settlement, in a wild romantic glen, is a steep overhanging rock, which is known throughout the country as the “Gipsy’s Rock,” and came to be so called from the following tragical occurrence.  It seems that many years ago—­about the middle of the last century, I believe—­there was a famine in the land, and the poor gipsies, poorer than all the rest, were reduced to great straits.  Some of them came to the neighbouring village and begged hard for food.  The selfish people turned them away, or at least tried to do so; but one poor fellow would not cease his importunities, and said that his children were literally starving.  “Then,” said one of the villagers in a mocking tone, “I will give your family a side of bacon if you will jump that rock.”

“You hear his promise?” cried the gipsy, appealing to the idle crowd.  He said not another word, but rushing from their midst, clambered up the rock, and in another instant took the fatal leap!

I see no reason to discredit the story, generally believed as it is in the district; and, happily for the honour of human nature, it has many a parallel, in another way perhaps, but equal in self-sacrifice and devotion.

The gipsies in Hungary are supposed to number at least 150,000.  The Czigany, as they are called, made their appearance early in the fifteenth century, having fled, it is believed, from the cruelty of the Mongol rulers.  They were allowed by King Sigismund to settle in Hungary, and were called in law the “new peasants.”  Before the reforms of 1848 they were in a state of absolute serfdom, and could not legally take service away from the place where they were born.  The case of the gipsy was the only instance in Hungary, even in the Hungary of the old regime, of absolute serfdom; for oppressive as were the obligations of the land-holding peasant to his lord, yet the relation between them was never that of master and slave.  As a matter of fact, if the Hungarian peasant gave up his session—­that is to say, the land he occupied in hereditary use—­he was free to go wheresoever he pleased, and was not