ome in some sort a subject. It did
not trouble itself about either the mountebank or the travelling barber,
or the quack doctor, or the peddler, or the open-air scholar, as long as
they had a trade to live by. Further than this, and with these
exceptions, the description of freedom which exists in the wanderer
terrified the law. A tramp was a possible public enemy. That modern
thing, the lounger, was then unknown; that ancient thing, the vagrant,
was alone understood. A suspicious appearance, that indescribable
something which all understand and none can define, was sufficient
reason that society should take a man by the collar. "Where do you live?
How do you get your living?" And if he could not answer, harsh penalties
awaited him. Iron and fire were in the code: the law practised the
cauterization of vagrancy.

Hence, throughout English territory, a veritable "loi des suspects" was
applicable to vagrants (who, it must be owned, readily became
malefactors), and particularly to gipsies, whose expulsion has
erroneously been compared to the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors
from Spain, and the Protestants from France. As for us, we do not
confound a battue with a persecution.

The Comprachicos, we insist, had nothing in common with the gipsies. The
gipsies were a nation; the Comprachicos were a compound of all
nations--the lees of a horrible vessel full of filthy waters. The
Comprachicos had not, like the gipsies, an idiom of their own; their
jargon was a promiscuous collection of idioms: all languages were mixed
together in their language; they spoke a medley. Like the gipsies, they
had come to be a people winding through the peoples; but their common
tie was association, not race. At all epochs in history one finds in the
vast liquid mass which constitutes humanity some of these streams of
venomous men exuding poison around them. The gipsies were a tribe; the
Comprachicos a freemasonry--a masonry having not a noble aim, but a
hideous handicraft. Finally, their religions differ--the gipsies were
Pagans, the Comprachicos were Christians, and more than that, good
Christians, as became an association which, although a mixture of all
nations, owed its birth to Spain, a devout land.

They were more than Christians, they were Catholics; they were more than
Catholics, they were Romans, and so touchy in their faith, and so pure,
that they refused to associate with the Hungarian nomads of the comitate
of Pesth, commanded and