they felt assured of obtaining booty with little or no risk to
themselves; but they were not by constitution adapted to rival
those bold and daring banditti of whom so many terrible anecdotes
are related in Spain and Italy, and who have acquired their renown
by the dauntless daring which they have invariably displayed in the
pursuit of plunder.

Besides trafficking in horses and mules, and now and then attacking
and plundering travellers upon the highway, the Gypsies of Spain
appear, from a very early period, to have plied occasionally the
trade of the blacksmith, and to have worked in iron, forming rude
implements of domestic and agricultural use, which they disposed
of, either for provisions or money, in the neighbourhood of those
places where they had taken up their temporary residence. As their
bands were composed of numerous individuals, there is no
improbability in assuming that to every member was allotted that
branch of labour in which he was most calculated to excel. The
most important, and that which required the greatest share of
cunning and address, was undoubtedly that of the chalan or jockey,
who frequented the fairs with the beasts which he had obtained by
various means, but generally by theft. Highway robbery, though
occasionally committed by all jointly or severally, was probably
the peculiar department of the boldest spirits of the gang; whilst
wielding the hammer and tongs was abandoned to those who, though
possessed of athletic forms, were perhaps, like Vulcan, lame, or
from some particular cause, moral or physical, unsuited for the
other two very respectable avocations. The forge was generally
placed in the heart of some mountain abounding in wood; the gaunt
smiths felled a tree, perhaps with the very axes which their own
sturdy hands had hammered at a former period; with the wood thus