restrain himself.

Vengeance is their idol. If any community has injured or affronted them,
they never cease endeavouring to retaliate, and will wipe it out in fire
and blood generations afterwards. There are towns which have thus been
suddenly harried when the citizens had forgotten that any cause of
enmity existed. Vengeance is their religion and their social law, which
guides all their actions among themselves. It is for this reason that
they are continually at war, duke with duke, and king with king. A
deadly feud, too, has set Bushman and gipsy at each other's throat, far
beyond the memory of man. The Romany looks on the Bushman as a dog, and
slaughters him as such. In turn, the despised human dog slinks in the
darkness of the night into the Romany's tent, and stabs his daughter or
his wife, for such is the meanness and cowardice of the Bushman that he
would always rather kill a woman than a man.

There is also a third class of men who are not true gipsies, but have
something of their character, though the gipsies will not allow that
they were originally half-breeds. Their habits are much the same, except
that they are foot men and rarely use horses, and are therefore called
the foot gipsies. The gipsy horse is really a pony. Once only have the
Romany combined to attack the house people, driven, like the Bushmen, by
an exceedingly severe winter, against which they had no provision.

But, then, instead of massing their forces and throwing their
irresistible numbers upon one city or territory, all they would agree to
do was that, upon a certain day, each tribe should invade the land
nearest to it. The result was that they were, though with trouble,
repulsed. Until lately, no leader ventured to follow the gipsies to
their strongholds, for they were reputed invincible behind their