to houses, when they steal linen, cloaks, silver, and any other
movable article which they can lay their hands on. They give a strict
account of everything to their captain, who takes his share of all they
get, except of what they earn by fortune-telling. They are very clever at
making a good bargain; when they know of a rich merchant being in the
place, they disguise themselves, enter into communications with him, and
swindle him, ... after which they change their clothes, have their horses
shod the reverse way, and the shoes covered with some soft material lest
they should be heard, and gallop away."

[Illustration: Fig. 373.--The Gipsy who used to wash his Hands in Molten
Lead.--Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the "Histoires Merveilleuses" of Pierre
Boaistuau: in 4to, 1560.]

In the "Histoire Generale des Larrons" we read that the vagabonds called
gipsies sometimes played tricks with goblets, sometimes danced on the
tight-rope, turned double-somersaults, and performed other feats (Fig.
373), which proves that these adventurers adopted all kinds of methods of
gaining a livelihood, highway robbery not excepted. We must not,
therefore, be surprised if in almost all countries very severe police
measures were taken against this dangerous race, though we must admit that
these measures sometimes partook of a barbarous character.

After having forbidden them, with a threat of six years at the galleys, to
sojourn in Spain, Charles V. ordered them to leave Flanders under penalty
of death. In 1545, a gipsy who had infringed the sentence of banishment
was condemned by the Court of Utrecht to be flogged till the blood
appeared, to have his nostrils slit, his hair removed, his beard shaved
off, and to be banished for life. "We can form some idea," says the German
historian Grellman, "of the miserable condition of the gipsies from the
following facts: many of them, and especially the women, have been burned
by their own request, in order to end their miserable state of existence;
and we can give the case of a gipsy who, having been arrested, flogged,
and conducted to the frontier, with the threat that if he reappeared in
the country he would be hanged, resolutely returned after three successive
and similar threats, at three different places, and implored that the
capital sentence might be carried out, in order that he might be released
from a life of such misery. These unfortunate people," continues the
historian, "were not even looked