offerings still remaining there date back to 1450 (Père Ribon, curate of the Three Maries in 1907). But it is said that Sara's shrine is really an altar of Mithra, their cult being in truth a worship of fire and water! This group, called locally Caraques, are said to be descended from the Iberians, who formerly lived here. Here is a suggestive index which may help in deciding the question of kinship with the Siginnoi; certainly, if true, it makes for a long sojourn of a primitive people in these parts rather than a migration of Hindus in recent times. Winstedt (in Gypsy and F.L. Gaz. i. London 1912) is unable, in describing their forms and ceremonies, to make clear which are truly gipsy or merely loans and imitations from neighbours. Even their great Transylvanian festival of Jack in the Green is the same as our St. George's or May Day rites and has no idiosyncrasy. If in Germany they worship trees, this is no more than the usual habit of Prussians, and indeed other 'Teutons,' down to a late period (Groome): indeed it is in harmless forms hardly extinct to-day either there or in Great Britain. Solf (Oriental. Gesells. Berlin. 1888) tells us of a gipsy pontiff, exerting both royal and priestly powers, elected for seven years, marrying, divorcing, banishing and reconciling members of the tribe. Marriages are mostly celebrated on Whitsunday and are careful to respect the prohibited degrees of German law. Adultery is very rare and harshly punished; children are baptized in the parish church nearest their encampment. They wear no mourning after a death and are described as 'full of piety'! Yet in Middle Ages the name 'heathen' (heiden) was commonly employed, as we saw above, in the town of Arnhem; but it is also certain that it was used in a racial sense of strangers admittedly Christian in faith. In Justinger's Chronicles of Bern (entry of 1419) we read that more than 200 'baptized heathen' had lately come to Basel, Bern and Zurich, 'from Egypt, pitiful black and wretched, camping before the town' until their thieving
