282 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. [N.S., XVI, 
called very energetic and enterprising, is quite helpless in all 
sorts of craftmanship. He comes to cities to buy the most 
necessary tools, and when they are broken or out of order he 
for ‘‘qalyan,” etc. Their women make sieves, so important In 
the domestic life of a Persian peasant, and fashion quite a 
number of small but necessary things. Gypsy work is always 
honest and reliable, and, having regard to the primitive 
instruments they use, it occasionally shows remarkable skill 
and finish. 
Living in great poverty and even at the best of times 
hardest time, they come to more inhabited places and towns, 
where they work for merchants, usually making wooden parts 
of pipes, combs, etc. 
t is noteworthy that in Eastern Persia the classical 
gypsy-professions appear to be non-existent, i.e. horse-deal- 
ing, fortune-telling, and singing. The first is impossible on 
account of their poverty and from the fact that there are very 
few horses in a Persian village. The second is out of the 
question, because there are always swarms of Mullas, Dervishes, 
and professional fortune-tellers, who perform their work with 
deep knowledge and scholarship, with the whole apparatus of 
Arabic books, quotations from the Quran, etc., etc., about 
which the poor and ignorant gypsy woman never can dream. 
gramophone. 
In Nishapur and Sabzawar an interesting old custom is 
observed. Gypsies have their own quarter (mahalla) in the 
central parts at the bazars of these two cities.!_ Some of them 
1 IT have not seen this in other Persian towns I visited. 
