The confidence trick in a great variety of forms has in the past been worked by them with considerable success, female domestics being perhaps their especial victims, but well-to-do people have by no means escaped their wiles. A trick, having innumerable variants, and which, in days gone by, had a very long and successful run,—perhaps it is still going,—was played upon those who believed gypsies to be the possessors of mystical powers; it consisted in the superstitious dupe being induced to believe that a sum of money enclosed in a packet and handed to the gypsy in order that she might for a small sum repeat over it certain unintelligible words, would become doubled in quantity and value a certain time after it had been returned to the owner and had been hidden in accordance with the gypsy’s directions. It is, perhaps, scarcely necessary to add that the gypsy either gave instructions for the hiding of the money in some place accessible to herself, or she acquired it by abstraction or substitution before returning the packet to the credulous owner, the result in any case being the same,—the gypsy got the money and was not to be found when the date given for the consummation of the spell arrived. Numerous accounts of similar frauds exist, many possibly having some foundation in fact, while others may be set down as purposely distorted facts, or as fabrications specially devised for fostering ill-feeling against the gypsies, or for justifying, as far as possible, the tyrannical measures taken to exterminate them. Looking back upon the harsh treatment meted out to the gypsies in former times, one can imagine the undercurrent of fear which prompted it, a fear bred of the superstitious beliefs of the times and kept alive by the outlandish appearance, seclusive habits, strange customs and secret tongue of the Romanies, items which, even to this day, are reckoned against them by the ignorant and superstitious. It is therefore difficult, if not impossible to find unbiassed accounts either of gypsy crime or petty frauds at almost any period in their history.