JUST BEFORE WINTER. 165 
shows its presence by the extraordinary and unusual 
coarseness of manner, The true English rustic is always 
civil, however rough, and will not offend you with any- 
thing unspeakable, so that at first it is quite bewildering 
to meet with such behaviour in the midst of green lanes. 
This is the explanation—the gipsy taint. Instead of 
the growing population obliterating the gipsy, the gipsy 
has saturated the English folk. 
When people saw the red man driven from the 
prairies and backwoods of America, and whole states as 
large as Germany without a single Indian left, much was 
written on the extermination of the aborigines by the 
stronger Saxon. As the generations lengthen, the facts 
appear to wear another aspect. From the intermarriage 
of the lower orders with the Indian squaws the Indian 
blood has got into the Saxon veins, and now the cry 
is that the red man is exterminating the Saxon, so 
greatly has he leavened the population. The typical 
Yankee face, as drawn in Punch, is indeed the red Indian 
profile with a white skin and a chimney-pot hat. Upon 
a small scale the same thing has happened in this 
village by the forest ; the gipsy half-breed has stained 
the native blood. Perhaps races like the Jew and gipsy, 
so often quoted as instances of the permanency of type, 
really owe that apparent fixidity to their power of 
mingling with other nations. They are kept alive as 
races by mixing; otherwise one of two things would 
happen—the Jew and the gipsy must have died out, 
or else have supplanted all the races of the globe. 
Had the Jews been so fixed a type, by this time their 
offspring would have been more numerous than the 
Chinese. The reverse, however, is the case; and there- 
fore we may suppose they must have become extinct, 
had it not been for fresh supplies of Saxon, Teuton, 
