"Amongst those who particularly attracted my attention were a father and son; the former a tall athletic figure, of about thirty, by profession a housebreaker and celebrated through Madrid for the peculiar dexterity he exhibited in his calling. He was in prison for an atrocious murder committed in the dead of night in a house in Carabanchel (a suburb of Madrid), in which his only accomplice was his son, a child under seven years of age. The imp was in every respect the counterpart of his father though in miniature. He too wore the robber shirt sleeves, the robber waistcoat with the silver buttons, the robber kerchief round his brow and, ridiculously enough, a long Manchegan knife in the crimson faja. He was evidently the pride of the ruffian father who took all imaginable care of him, would dandle him on his knee, and would occasionally take the cigar from his own mustachioed lips and insert it in the urchin's mouth. The boy was the pet of the court, for the father was one of the 'bullies' of the prison and those who feared his prowess and wished to pay their court to him were always fondling the child." Borrow when in the "Carcel de la Corte" renewed his acquaintance with one, Balseiro, whom he had met in a low tavern frequented by thieves and bull fighters on a previous visit to Madrid. One of these, Sevilla by name, professed deep admiration for the Englishman and backed him to know more than most people of the "crabbed" Gitano language. A match was made with this Balseiro who claimed to have been in prison half his life and to be on most intimate terms with the gipsies. When Borrow came across him for the second time he was confined in an upper story of the prison in a strong room with other malefactors. There was no mistaking this champion criminal with his small, slight, active figure and his handsome features, "but they were those of a demon." He had recently been found guilty of aiding and abetting a celebrated thief, Pepe Candelas, in a desperate robbery perpetrated in open daylight on no less a person than the Queen's milliner, a Frenchwoman, whom they bound in her own shop, from which they took goods to the amount of five or six thousand dollars. Candelas had already suffered for his crime, but Balseiro, whose reputation was the worse of the two, had saved his life by the plentiful use of money, and the capital sentence had in his case been commuted to twenty years' hard labour in the _presidio_ of Malaga.