The Spanish Gypsies are remarkable for beauty in early youth: for magnificent eyes and hair, regular features, light and well-knit figures, easy gait, and graceful bearing. Their locks, like the Hindus, are lamp-black, and without a sign of wave; and they preserve the characteristic eye. The form is perfect, and it has an especial look to which is attributed the power of engendering _grandes passions_--one of the privileges of the eye. I have often remarked its fixity and brilliance, which flashes like phosphoric light, the gleam which in some eyes denotes madness. I have also noted the “far-off look” which seems to gaze at something beyond you, and the alternation from the fixed stare to a glazing or filming over of the pupil.[210] Hence the English song: A Gypsy stripling’s glossy (?) eye Has pierced my bosom’s core, A feat no eye beneath the sky Could e’er effect before. And in Spain it is remarked that the Gypsy man often makes a conquest of the Busno’s wife. The women are more voluble in language and licentious in manners than the men. These characteristics, combined with the most absolute repulsion for other favours, even to the knife, explain how many sons of grandees and great officials took part in the nightly orgies and by day favoured the proscribed caste. Moreover, the Gitana protected herself by the possession of family secrets. Besides soothsaying and philter-selling, she had a store of the _Raiz del buen Baron_ (the goodman’s, _i.e._ the devil’s, root), alias Satan’s herb, which relieved incommodious burdens. At fairs, while the husbands were chapping and chaffering, the good-wives made money by the process called _coger á la mano_ (to catch in hand); that is, pilfering coins by sleight during the process of exchanging. Amongst other malpractices is one called in Romani _Youjano báro_ (the great trick), translated _gran socaliña_ (great trick) by Jermimo de Alcalá in his novel the _Historia de Alonzo, mozo de muchos amos_ (a youth with many uncles), written in the early seventeenth century. Rich and covetous widows were persuaded to deposit jewels and money in dark and unfrequented places, with the idea of finding buried treasure. Useless to say that the Gypsy woman was the only gainer by the transaction. We read that the old Gypsy dress was repeatedly forbidden by law; but Spanish tradition preserves no memory of what the dress was. I have little doubt that the immigrants of the fifteenth century had retained to some extent the Hindu costume, the Pagrí (head-cloth) and the Dhoti (waist-cloth). So in Moscow I have seen the Gypsy dancing-girls assume the true toilette of the Hindustani Nachni, the Choli, or bodice, and the Peshwáz, or petticoat of many folds. Some writers imagine that the “picturesque vagabonds,” Calós, had borrowed their peculiar garb from the Moors.