fellows the good luck which they were to enjoy, never failing in
the first place to ask for a cuarto or real, in order to make the
sign of the cross; and with these flattering words, they got as
much as they could, although, it is true, not much in money, as
their harvest in that article was generally slight; but enough in
bacon to afford subsistence to their husbands and bantlings. I
looked on and laughed at the simplicity of those foolish people,
who, especially such as wished to be married, were as satisfied and
content with what the Gitana told them, as if an apostle had spoken
it.'

The above description of Gitanas telling fortunes amongst the
villages of Navarre, and which was written by a Spanish author at
the commencement of the seventeenth century, is, in every respect,
applicable, as the reader will not fail to have observed, to the
English Gypsy women of the present day, engaged in the same
occupation in the rural districts of England, where the first
demand of the sibyls is invariably a sixpence, in order that they
may cross their hands with silver, and where the same promises are
made, and as easily believed; all which, if it serves to confirm
the opinion that in all times the practices and habits of the
Egyptian race have been, in almost all respects, the same as at the
present day, brings us also to the following mortifying conclusion,
- that mental illumination, amongst the generality of mankind, has
made no progress at all; as we observe in the nineteenth century
the same gross credulity manifested as in the seventeenth, and the
inhabitants of one of the countries most celebrated for the arts of
civilisation, imposed upon by the same stale tricks which served to
deceive two centuries before in Spain, a country whose name has
long and justly been considered as synonymous with every species of