Spain--many of them, as we have said, being
Basques.

The law for the protection of children had at first this strange result:
it caused many children to be abandoned.

The immediate effect of the penal statute was to produce a crowd of
children, found or rather lost. Nothing is easier to understand. Every
wandering gang containing a child was liable to suspicion. The mere fact
of the child's presence was in itself a denunciation.

"They are very likely Comprachicos." Such was the first idea of the
sheriff, of the bailiff, of the constable. Hence arrest and inquiry.
People simply unfortunate, reduced to wander and to beg, were seized
with a terror of being taken for Comprachicos although they were nothing
of the kind. But the weak have grave misgivings of possible errors in
justice. Besides, these vagabond families are very easily scared. The
accusation against the Comprachicos was that they traded in other
people's children. But the promiscuousness caused by poverty and
indigence is such that at times it might have been difficult for a
father and mother to prove a child their own.

How came you by this child? how were they to prove that they held it
from God? The child became a peril--they got rid of it. To fly
unencumbered was easier; the parents resolved to lose it--now in a wood,
now on a strand, now down a well.

Children were found drowned in cisterns.

Let us add that, in imitation of England, all Europe henceforth hunted
down the Comprachicos. The impulse of pursuit was given. There is
nothing like belling the cat. From this time forward the desire to seize
them made rivalry and emulation among the police of all countries, and
the alguazil was not less keenly watchful than the constable.

One could still read, twenty-three years ago, on a stone of the gate of
Otero, an untranslatable inscription--the words of the code outraging
propriety. In it, however, the shade of difference which existed between
the buyers and the stealers of children is very strongly marked. Here is
part of the inscription in somewhat rough Castillan, _Aqui quedan las
orejas de los Comprachicos, y las bolsas de los robaninos, mientras que
se van ellos al trabajo de mar_. You see the confiscation of ears, etc.,
did not prevent the owners going to the galleys. Whence followed a
general rout among all vagabonds. They started frightened; they arrived
trembling. On every shore in Europe their furtive advent was watched.
Impossible for su