the earth in order to preserve their lives. But these days passed
by; their persecutors became weary of pursuing them; they showed
their heads from the holes and caves where they had hidden
themselves, they ventured forth, increased in numbers, and, each
tribe or family choosing a particular circuit, they fairly divided
the land amongst them.

In England, the male Gypsies are all dealers in horses, and
sometimes employ their idle time in mending the tin and copper
utensils of the peasantry; the females tell fortunes. They
generally pitch their tents in the vicinity of a village or small
town by the road side, under the shelter of the hedges and trees.
The climate of England is well known to be favourable to beauty,
and in no part of the world is the appearance of the Gypsies so
prepossessing as in that country; their complexion is dark, but not
disagreeably so; their faces are oval, their features regular,
their foreheads rather low, and their hands and feet small. The
men are taller than the English peasantry, and far more active.
They all speak the English language with fluency, and in their gait
and demeanour are easy and graceful; in both points standing in
striking contrast with the peasantry, who in speech are slow and
uncouth, and in manner dogged and brutal.

The dialect of the Rommany, which they speak, though mixed with
English words, may be considered as tolerably pure, from the fact
that it is intelligible to the Gypsy race in the heart of Russia.
Whatever crimes they may commit, their vices are few, for the men
are not drunkards, nor are the women harlots; there are no two
characters which they hold in so much abhorrence, nor do any words
when applied by them convey so much execration as these two.