is very uncommon among the Spanish gitanas. When very
young, they may pass as being attractive in their ugliness, but once
they have reached motherhood, they become absolutely repulsive. The
filthiness of both sexes is incredible, and no one who has not seen a
gipsy matron's hair can form any conception of what it is, not even
if he conjures up the roughest, the greasiest, and the dustiest heads
imaginable. In some of the large Andalusian towns certain of the gipsy
girls, somewhat better looking than their fellows, will take more care
of their personal appearance. These go out and earn money by performing
dances strongly resembling those forbidden at our public balls in
carnival time. An English missionary, Mr. Borrow, the author of two very
interesting works on the Spanish gipsies, whom he undertook to convert
on behalf of the Bible Society, declares there is no instance of any
gitana showing the smallest weakness for a man not belonging to her
own race. The praise he bestows upon their chastity strikes me as being
exceedingly exaggerated. In the first place, the great majority are
in the position of the ugly woman described by Ovid, "_Casta quam nemo
rogavit_." As for the pretty ones, they are, like all Spanish women,
very fastidious in choosing their lovers. Their fancy must be taken,
and their favour must be earned. Mr. Borrow quotes, in proof of their
virtue, one trait which does honour to his own, and especially to his
simplicity: he declares that an immoral man of his acquaintance offered
several gold ounces to a pretty gitana, and offered them in vain. An
Andalusian, to whom I retailed this anecdote, asserted that the immoral
man in question would have been far more successful if he had shown the
girl two or three piastres, and that to offer gold ounces to a gipsy was
as poor a method of persuasion as to promise a couple of millions to a
tavern wench. However that may be, it is certain that the gitana shows
the most extraordinary devotion to her husband. There is no danger and
no suffering she will not brave, to help him in his need. One of the
names which the gipsies apply to themselves, _Rome_, or "the married
couple," seems to me a proof of their racial respect for the married
state. Speaking generally, it may be asserted that their chief virtue is
their patriotism--if we may thus describe the fidelity they observe in
all their relations with persons of the same origin as their own, their
readiness to help one