Another gypsy, in prison for having sworn falsely, was visited by a priest, who tried to convince him of the sinfulness of his conduct in swearing to what he had not seen.
“You are loading a heavy sin on your soul,” said the priest.
“Have I got a soul?” asked the Tzigane, innocently.
“Of course you have got a soul; every man has one.”
“Can your reverence swear that I have got a soul?”
“To be sure I can.”
“Yet your reverence cannot see my soul, so why should it be wrong to swear to what one has not seen?”
A gypsy condemned to be hung bethought himself at the last moment of asking to be baptized. He wished to die a Christian, he said, having professed no religion all his life. His plan was successful, for the execution was suspended, and all sympathies enlisted in his favor. When, however, all was ready for the baptism, the gypsy occasioned much surprise by asking to be received into the Calvinistic faith. Why not choose the Catholic religion, which was that of the place, he was asked, since there was no apparent reason to the contrary. “No, no,” returned the cautious Tzigane; “I will keep the Catholic religion for another time.”
Though rarely believing in the immortality of the soul, the Tzigane usually holds with the doctrine of transmigration, and often supposes the spirit of some particular gypsy to have passed into a bat or a bird; further believing that when that animal is killed, the spirit passes back to another new-born gypsy.
However miserable their lives, the Tziganes never commit suicide; only one solitary instance is recorded by some traveller, whose name I forget, of an old gypsy woman, who, to escape her persecutors, begged a shepherd to bury her alive.