They are, as a people,—at least they seemed to me,—larger and stouter than the Spanish; and by no means so well-favored. Dark complexions, black eyes, long straight black hair, high cheek-bones, and short noses, they resemble North American Indians more than any European race. They are not cleanly in their persons, nor their dwellings; their roaming habits lead them to eat and sleep anywhere, with their dogs and donkeys; they dwell in caves if no better houses are at their command, and the hill behind the city, which we see from the towers of the Alhambra, is pierced with holes that lead into the chambers where they make their homes. They have also one quarter of the town where they have dwellings, but the walls of a city are not agreeable to the freedom of their wills, and they prefer the hills and the country. They have no _moral_ principle. There is but one virtue known among them, and that is so rare in Spain, and so remarkable among such a people, that it must be set down to their credit at the very start. The women are chaste, and that to a degree that perhaps no other people in the world can claim. It is the one feature of their character that redeems them from the curse of utter and hopeless vagabondism, and, standing out as it does like an ivory tower in the midst of a waste of moral ruin, its beauty is the more lovely and its existence the more wonderful. I cannot say what I would of the care with which mothers guard their daughters from contamination with their own race and the outside world; and I cannot add another word in their praise. They live by fraud. Known to the world as swindlers and liars and thieves, they are nevertheless tolerated, and perhaps because feared; their ill-will being dreaded, and their friendship supposed to be conciliated by complying with their demands.