as pedlars and strolling mountebanks and while professing Islam hawk about pictures of Hindu godlings: others are acrobats, snake-charmers and bird-snarers; others again sell quack remedies, extract teeth or execute tatuing. In U. Provinces they are known as thieves and rascals, and are here in a much more degraded state than in Bengal, worshipping the dread Mother-goddess (Devi, Kali) as their tribal patroness. Many pay cult to a Moslem saint called Sayyid whom they wrongly identify with Mahomet. They seem to depend largely on ancestor-worship, which is perhaps their most genuine form of worship. In appearance they resemble Doms and belong to the 'pure gipsy race' (Dr. W. Crooke), if we can allow that such is to be found. Like the western nomad, they have no religious beliefs or principles of their own; but take their complexion, like chameleons, by conforming to environment, being Hindu or Muslim with the majority of their neighbours (cf. Rajend. Mitra in Mem. Anthropol. Soc. iii. 122). Some are Deists, some Sikhs or Kabir-panthis (without really understanding these refined forms of religion), others panchpiryas (Dr. Crooke's Tribes and Castes of N.W. Prov., London 1896). The Dravidian Dom of the Punjab represents the more artistic side of 'gipsy' life (Ibbetson, Panj. Ethnogr., Calcutta 1883): he will be a minstrel and ballad-monger playing on cymbal, drum and violin, while the females amuse the zenanas. They are now quite distinct from their degraded namesakes in other parts and have, nominally at least, embraced Islam. In the Ganges plains they are vagrants pure and simple, without even shelters or tents, always thieves and invoking a burglar Gandak (in Gorakhpur), who had been hanged for his crimes, as their chief patron; they employ no priests and hill-pigs in honour of Gandak or a female goddess when occasion arises. Risley (writing of Behar in Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Calcutta 1891), thinks they may have some idea of a sovereign deity, Paramesvar, who punishes
