IN FRANCIS HINDES GROOME'S lifetime his fellow gypsiologists admitted their scholarly debt to him, remarking on his extensive knowledge of things Gypsy. Folklorists, however, have been less attracted to his works.' Summing up his career in I899, Groome modestly concluded: am no folklorist; I have merely dabbled in folklore as a branch of the great Egyptian Question, which includes also intricate problems of philology, ethnology, crainology, archaeology, history, music, and what not besides. But for twenty years I have been trying to interest folklorists in Gypsy folk-tales. Vainly so far. . ... Because his ideas often have been overlooked by folklorists and because Groome courted anonymity and loved the inconspicuous, thus making documentation difficult, we have no formal statement of the factors stimulating his interest in folklore scholarship and of his relationship with the nineteenth-century British folklore movement. Nor have writers adequately described the intellectual legacy that influenced his notions of the Gypsies' significance in the dissemination of European beliefs and prose narratives during historical times. Francis Groome, the second son of Robert Hindes Groome, Archdeacon of and Rector of Monk Soham, was born on August 30, I851, at his father's rectory near Framlingham. Before his death on January 24, 1902, Groome established himself as the foremost commentator on Gypsy life, language, and lore. He made his initial literary venture during 1877-1878 as joint editor, with his father and Edward Fitzgerald, of Suffolk Notes and Queries for the Ipswich Journal. Groome contributed generously and on a variety of subjects to such publications as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Dictionary of National Biography, Blackwood's Magazine, The Athenaeum, Johnson's Universal Encyclopedia, The Bookman, Chambers's Biographical Dictionary, The Ordinance Gazetteer of Scotland, and Notes and Queries; and from 1887 to I892 he held the post of subeditor for Chambers's Encyclopedia. He wrote a novel of Gypsy life entitled Kriegspiel, a short border history, and a sketch of his father and Fitzgerald. He left an autobiographical account of his six years with the Gypsies, appropriately