family, at whose house he had often quartered,
could not pay her rent.  Charlie lent her the
money out of his own pocket; but when the
factor was returning home with it in his own
pocket, Charlie robbed him of his gear, then
went back to the woman and gave her a
discharge in full for the sum just borrowed of
him.  When he was apprehended—for all these
great men came to very bad and small ends—the
people gathered about in wonder to stare at him,
renowned as he was.  "Let me free, and gie
me a stick three feet long, and I'll clear the
knowe o' them!" shouted Charlie, maddened by
their curiosity.  He was an exceedingly handsome
man, with such small hands and feet that
both gyves and manacles slipped easily over
them; but, in spite of his tricks, he was an
immense favourite with the people, being of that
darling, dare-devil, generous nature which
always makes a popular rogue.

Most of the chiefs were desperate characters,
and always in the heart of some terrific scuffle
with the law.  There were the Browns and the
Wilsons, for example, noted horse-stealers if
nothing worse, and hanged for their crimes
when the law got too sharp for them.  Charles
Brown, one of the gang, was a man of great
personal strength, but was run down at last,
and carried to Perth jail.  In the condemned
cell he managed to slip his irons, and to set fire
to the straw on which he lay.  Surprised at the
building being on fire, suspecting Brown to
have been the cause of it, and that he was free
from his chains, ramping like a lion in his den,
no one was anxious to face him.  At last a
sergeant of the 42nd volunteered, and went to
the cell-door, which he unbarred, letting out
the smoke into the prison.

"Who's there?" he said.

"The devil!" vociferated the gipsy, through
fire and smoke.

"I am also the devil and of the black watch,"
thundered back the intrepid Highlander.

The tinkler was daunted.  The superior
force of law in the person of the sergeant
carried the day; his irons were refixed, and poor
Charles Brown remained passive until he left his
cell for the gallows.

Peter Young, another gipsy of the same class,
broke out of many prisons before he was finally
caged and hanged. He was one of the
"honourable" gipsies, faithful to his word and
generous to his friends, and always only just a
rope's length in advance of death, which finally
overtook and tripped him up.  Lizzie Brown, by
some called "Snippy," was a member of the
Brown family just spoken of.  She was a tall
stout woman, and had been handsome in her
day and while her face was complete; but after
she lost her nose in a battle of the tribes fought
in Angus, she was not quite so comely.  The
gipsies fought there with highland dirks, and
poor Lizzie came in for her share of the hard
knocks and flourishes. In the heat of the
battle she suddenly put her hand to her face,
and called out,  "But in the middle of the
mean time, where's my nose?"  without either
surprise or lamentation for the loss. It was all
in the way of war, and Lizzie Brown, alias
Snippy, was content to suffer with the rest.

The perpetual fights among the tribes make
another feature of gipsy life not over-fascinating
to peaceable and honest citizens.  The Faas and
the Baillies and the Shawes and the Browns had
a "polymachy" at Romanno in 1677, and four
Shawes were hanged in consequence of the
murders done there.  Charles Brown, one of
the chief members of the Lochgellie band, was
killed in a fight at Raploch, near Stirling; there
was a tremendous foray at the Bridge of
Hawick in 1773, another at Eskdalemoor a few
days after, to settle the question of supremacy,
which had not got settled at Hawick; and
again a  "faction fight" at Dumblane, where
Becky Keith distinguished herself with the aid
of a flail, and sent off a crowd with "sarks full
of sair banes."  William Faa, the gipsy king of
the Yetholm horde, had a grand, almost an
heroic contest with the  "Earl of Hell," one
Young, of New Coldstream, in which the king
was victorious over the earl.  Faa had twenty-
four children, and at each christening appeared
in his original wedding robes, accompanied by
twelve young girls as handmaidens to his
guests.  When he died, "his corpse was escorted
between Coldstream and Yetholm by above
three hundred asses."  So that, what with
faction fights and highway robberies, sorning
and petty thefts, child-stealing and fire-raising,
pocket-picking and crafty dishonesty of all
kinds, the Scottish gipsies were not the most
delightful neighbours in the world; and it has
been infinitely to the advantage of society that
they have become reclaimed and civilised, and are
only now to be regarded as a mystery and a
secret, a strange unspoken infusion of foreign
blood and secret customs, all kept in the dark,
and known only to the initiated.

Disguises, as many as there were social
characters to imitate, helped the gipsy thief on his
way.  As a fine gentleman riding a good horse,
and ruffled and beringed, the vagabond tinkler
of the moor and the wayside barn deceived
many a country  "softy,"  and was able to lift
many a well-filled purse, and to learn the goings
and comings of the well-to-do lairds not
travelling in company or too heavily armed.  As
sailors, as travelling pedlars, as workmen of all
honest callings to be exercised by the industrious,
they penetrated everywhere, learning family
secrets, and turning their learning to account,
earning a penny more or less honest when time
and the occasion served, while their cleverness
in craft was as great as their cleverness in
disguise.  One Alexander Brown, the worthy
mentioned above as the horse-stealer who was
handed, saw in a field an ox with a "rat tail,"
having lost about three-fourths of that appendage.
Borrowing a tail of the same colour as
the creature's, he fastened it to the stump, and
started off with his prize, shipping at the Queensferry
for the south.  Here he was overtaken by
a servant of the owner, who could not be quite
certain of the ox, because of the long tail; else