ted; although the farmer of whom he bought it,
came forward and swore to the horse being the same which he had sold him.
His evidence was rejected on account of some slight mistake in the
description he gave of it. When under the gallows, the frantic Gipsy
exclaimed--_Oh God_, _if thou dost not deliver me_, _I will not believe
there is a God_!

The following anecdote will prove the frequent oppression of this people.
Not many years since, a collector of taxes in a country town, said he had
been robbed of fifty pounds by a Gipsy; and being soon after at Blandford
in Dorsetshire, he fixed on a female Gipsy, as the person who robbed him
in company with two others, and said she was in man's clothes at the
time. They were taken up and kept in custody for some days; and had not
a farmer voluntarily come forward, and proved that they were many miles
distant when the robbery was said to be perpetrated, they would have been
tried for their lives, and probably hanged. The woman was the wife of
Wm. Stanley, (who was in custody with her,) who now reads the Scriptures
in the Gipsy tents near Southampton. Their wicked accuser was afterwards
convicted of a crime for which he was condemned to die, when he confessed
that he had not been robbed at the time referred to, but had himself
spent the whole of the sum in question.

Another Gipsy of the name of Stanley was lately indicted at Winchester,
for house-breaking, and had not his friends at great expense proved an
_alibi_, it is likely he might have been executed. And in this way have
they been suspected and persecuted ever since the days of Henry the
Eighth. They have been hunted like wild beasts; their property has been
taken from them; themselves have been frequently imprisoned, and in many
cases their lives taken, or what to many of them would be much worse,
they have been transported to another part of the world, for ever divided
from their families and friends.

In the days of Judge Hale, thirteen of these unhappy beings were hanged
at Bury St Edmonds, for no other cause than that they were Gipsies; and
at that time it was death without benefit of clergy, for any one to live
among them for a month. Even in later days two of the most industrious
of this people have had a small pony and two donkeys taken away merely on
suspicion that they were stolen. They were apprehended and carried
before a magistrate, to whom they proved that the animals were their own,
and that they h