The old-fashioned belief that gypsies are in the habit of stealing children has long since been proved to be utterly without foundation. Why, indeed, should gypsies, already endowed with a numerous progeny, seek to burden themselves with foreign elements which can bring them no sort of profit? That they frequently have beguiled children out of reach in order to strip them of their clothes and ornaments has probably given rise to this mistake; and when, as occasionally, we come across a light-complexioned child in a gypsy camp, it is more natural to suppose its mother to have been the passing fancy of some fair-haired stranger than itself to have been abstracted from wealthy parents. Tzigane babies are at once inured to the utmost extremes of heat and cold. If they are born in winter they are rubbed with snow; if in summer, anointed with grease and laid in the burning sun. Though trained to resist all weathers, the Tzigane has a marked antipathy for wind, which seems for the time to weaken his physical and mental powers, and deprive him of all life and energy. Cold he patiently endures; but only in summer can he really be said to live and enjoy his life. There is a legend which tells how the gypsies, pining under the heavy frosts and snows with which the earth was visited, appealed to God to have pity on them, and to grant them always twice as many summers as winters. The Almighty, in answer to this request, spoke as follows: “Two summers shall you have to every winter; but as it would disturb the order of nature if both summers came one on the back of the other, I shall always give you two summers with a winter between to divide them.” The gypsies humbly thanked the Almighty for the granted favor, and never again complained of the cold, for, as they say, they have now always two summers to every winter. Another legend relates how the Tziganes once used to have cornfields of their own, and how, when the green corn had grown high for the first time, the wind caused it to wave and shake like ripples on the water, which seeing, a gypsy boy came running in alarm to his parents, crying, “Father, father! quick, make haste! the corn is running away!” On hearing this the gypsies all hastened forth with knives and sickles to cut down the fugitive corn, which of course never ripened, and discouraged by their first agricultural essay the gypsies never attempted to sow or reap again.