o open violence as
the brigands of Spain, Turkey and other parts of the East. They follow
out an organised system, at least, they go to work upon different lines.
In the first place, they send a kind of advance-guard to find out where
the loot and soft hearts lay and the weaknesses of those who hold them,
and when this has been done they bring all the arts their evil
disposition can devise to bear upon the weak points till they are
successful. When Mahmood was returning with his victorious army from the
war in the eleventh century with the spoils and plunder of war upon their
backs, and while the soldiers were either lain down to rest or allured
away with the Gipsy girls' "witching eyes," the old Gipsies, numbering
some hundreds, who where camping in the neighbourhood, bolted off with
their war prizes; this so enraged Mahmood, after finding out that he had
been sold by a lot of low-caste Indians or Gipsies, that he sent his army
after them and slew the whole band of these wandering Indians.

[Picture: A gentleman gipsy's tent, and his dog, "Grab," Hackney Marshes]

Sometimes they will put on a hypocritical air of religious sanctity; at
other times they will dress their prettiest girls in Oriental finery and
gaudy colours on purpose to catch the unwary; at other times they will
try to lay hold of the sympathic by sending out their old women and
tottering men dressed in rags; and at other times they will endeavour to
lay hold of the benevolent by sending out women heavily laden with
babies, and in this way they have Gipsyised and are still Gipsyising our
own country from the time they landed in Scotland in the year 1514, until
they besieged London now more than two centuries ago, planting their
encampments in the most degraded parts on the outskirts of our great
city; and this holds good of them even to this day. They are never to be
seen living in the throng of a town or in the thick of a fight. In
sketching the plan of campaigning for the day, the girls with pretty
"everlasting flowers" go in one direction, the women with babies tackle
the tradesmen and householders by selling skewers, clothes-pegs, and
other useful things, but in reality to beg, and the old women with the
assistance of the servant girls face the brass knockers through the back
kitchen. The men are all this time either loitering about the tents or
skulking down the lanes spotting out their game for the night, with their
lurcher dogs at their heels.