“You should purchase a better guitar, Señor Antonio, and go to London. You would come home a rich man.”
He smiled, showing his glittering white teeth and shook his head:--
“I have a wife and five children, Señora,” he replied; “London is too far off.”
And he did not like the disparagement of his guitar, I think, for he took it up and tuned it in a caressing sort of way, as if it were a living pet we had been slighting.
There is nothing of romance left to the gipsies in Spain now but their costume, even that fast disappearing, and their music. When Borrow wrote of them more than sixty years ago, he speaks of the happy effects of Charles the Third’s edicts, which, by admitting the gipsies into the pale of civilised society, has done more than the fierce persecutions of his predecessors to assimilate this savage race with others. Ferdinand and Isabella and the Philips, did their utmost to put down what they called the Egyptians, publishing edict after edict against them, but in vain. Whilst they were a proscribed caste, whilst the very privilege of sanctuary was denied them, whilst they were hunted down and persecuted by fire and sword, the Egyptians, or Gitanos, flourished and had their palmy days; murdering, stealing, cheating, telling fortunes, hating the Busnees, and all who were not Romanys, to their heart’s content. _Gitanisimo_--that is to say, quoting Borrow, gipsy villany of every description, flourished till _Gitanisimo_ was declared to be no more. Charles the Third, in 1733, published a humane edict in which he declared the gipsies capable of following any career of arts and sciences, and altogether ignored that they were a separate people, amenable to separate laws. What was the consequence? _The law of Carlos Tercero has superseded gipsy law_, say the gipsies a little regretfully. _Gitanisimo_, or gipsydom, if not wholly transformed, has been modified. The gipsies no longer wander about living by murder and theft. The women still tell fortunes, and the men, as dealers in horses and mules, are not to be trusted, but they are everywhere spoken of as a poor and harmless set of people; and though the instinct of caste is just as strong as ever among themselves, they are no longer feared or hated. At the time Borrow wrote the gipsies in Spain numbered 40,000 souls; at the commencement of the present century they numbered only 20,000, so that the race here, as elsewhere, seems dying out, or, at any rate, greatly decreasing. Indeed, nothing else could have been expected of them. Wild animals from African deserts are not more out of place, caged in English gardens, than these kings and queens of savagedom compelled to sleep under a roof, and to consider killing as murder. But their dancing and music are worthy of a less lawless and terrible race, and are _cosas de España_, not to be missed by any travellers.