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THE GYPSIES 231
woman leading a perfectly naked child by the hand,
sometimes when there is snow on the ground.
The gypsy does nothing for nothing. Whether he
acts proudly as a Spaniard, or babbles away carelessly
at a great rate, he always has his eye on the main
chance. The Andalusians themselves say of him that
he takes pay for every blink of his eye. Arch-impostor
that he is, the gypsy knows the value of repartee when
dealing with Andalusians. He does not scatter his wit
but saves it for a flare in crises, and rakes in his shekels
while the laugh goes round. The people know his
technique but they pardon him for the sake of the joke
and revenge themselves by regarding him as a rather
contemptible but amusing parasite.
The Andalusians of former days appear not to have
been so good-natured as those of ours. Since they too
were usually worsted when doing business with the
gypsy, they limited him, as they did the Jews, to certain
quarters of the cities and restricted his freedom. Such
a gypsy ghetto is to be found in the Sevillian suburb of
Triana, and it is not so very long ago that a massacre
of the Triana inhabitants was perpetrated by the popu-
lation of Seville. Most of the gypsies of Seville still
live in Triana. .
In the flat southwest of Andalusia, the gypsy lives
in houses like those of other men or builds a funny lit-
tle cabin of old rags, rusty tin plates and leaves of
cactus. But wherever he finds even a trace of a hillock,
he prefers to dig himself in on its slope. By far the
greater portion of the gypsies of Andalusia live in scat-
tered caves, and near Granada there are cave-dwelling
communities of several thousand persons.
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