When Gipsies take up their quarters on the premises of country people, a very effectual way of sometimes getting rid of them is to stir up discord among them. For when it comes to "hammers and tongs," "tongs and hammers," they will scatter, uttering howls of vengeance, on some more appropriate occasion, against their most intimate friends, who have just incurred their wrath, yet who will be seen "cheek by jowl" with them, perhaps, the next day, or even before the sun has gone down upon them; so easily are they sometimes irritated, and so easily reconciled.--ED. So formidable were the numbers of the nomadic Gipsies, at one time, and so alarming their desperate and sanguinary battles, in the upper parts of Tweed-dale and Clydesdale, that the fencible men in their neighbourhood, (the _country-side_ was the expression,) had sometimes to turn out to quell and disperse them. A clergyman was, on one occasion, under the necessity of dismissing his congregation, in the middle of divine service, that they might quell one of these furious Gipsy tumults, in the immediate vicinity of the church.[130] [130] A writer in Blackwood's Magazine mentions that the Gipsies, late in the seventeenth century, broke into the house of Pennicuik, when the greater part of the family were at church. Sir John Clerk, the proprietor, barricaded himself in his own apartment, where he sustained a sort of siege--firing from the windows upon the robbers, who fired upon him in return. One of them, while straying through the house in quest of booty, happened to ascend the stairs of a very narrow turret, but, slipping his foot, caught hold of the rope of the alarm bell, the ringing of which startled the congregation assembled in the parish church. They instantly came to the rescue of the Laird, and succeeded, it is said, in apprehending some of the Gipsies, who were executed. There is a written account of this daring assault kept in the records of the family.--ED.