Another instant and the boys would have been in a bad position, for both the gipsies were powerful fellows, and appeared determined to commit violence.

Gipsies in times of yore were the scape-goats of the peasantry: if "cock" were "purloined" or any other rural mischief done by night, it was immediately fathered upon a neighbouring tent of "the dark race.

These gipsies are the terror of travellers in Persia, the men, most of them, gaining a precarious living as tinkers and leather-workers, with an occasional highway robbery to keep their hand in, the women living entirely by thieving and prostitution.

But the two gipsies were no mean antagonists.