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 upon as human beings, for, during a hunting party, consisting of members of a small German court, the huntsmen had no scruple whatever in killing a gipsy woman who was suckling her child, just as they would have done any wild beast which came in their way.”

M. Francisque Michel says, “Amongst the questions which arise from a consideration of the existence of this remarkable people, is one which, although neglected, is nevertheless of considerable interest, namely, how, with a strange language, unlike any used in Europe, the gipsies could make themselves understood by the people amongst whom they made their appearance for the first time:  newly arrived in the west,