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238 DAYS IN THE SUN
apricot-, peach- and cherry-trees. And the blue sunny
air warms us with fragrant breath.
The gypsies have been an inexhaustible source of
popular superstition and romance. ‘Their restless
vagabondage, which has scattered them from the Cau-
casus to the Atlantic Ocean, from the North Cape to
the southern boundary of Morocco, and their apparent
contempt for any mode of life that is associated with
fixed tenure of land or with fixed social forms, their
lack of respect for the property of others, their un-
trammeled existence and apparent contempt for com-
fort, which enables them to sleep in the snow and to
give birth to their children at the edge of an open
ditch, their mysterious appearances and disappear-
ances, their slick thievish exploits and their incompre-
hensible thievish jargon—all these conditions were
forced upon them in the Middle Ages. In that era
they were driven from place to place and denied any
possibility of existence; but they remained a cause of
offense to the medieval man, securely ensconced in the
walls of his cities and customs. How was it possible
for such careless birds to make a livelihood while
starvation harried the most orderly system of society?
How did they escape from robbery and violence when
all the others, gathered together under the protection
of fortified castles and city walls, could not maintain
themselves? How could they survive nights spent in
the great forest, while other men in their secure al-
coves dared not draw a breath in their superstitious
awe of spirits?
Surely they must have allied themselves with the
powers of evil, always the only powers that grant vic-
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