Gypsy and Ginger

by Eleanor Farjeon

GYPSY AND GINGER’S FRIENDS

This episode in the lives of Gypsy and Ginger ought really to be called Tales of an Old Adventure. For that, if they could believe him, was what the Taxi-Man was.

Though I have given precedence to the Pavement Artist, the Taxi-Man was really the first friend the Weatherhouse brought them. It was he who began it all by dropping in at twelve and demanding a sossidge, and it was he who spread their fame and hospitality over all the kerbs and street-corners in the city.

After his second visit he said, “Now I’ve discovered you young people, I’ll make you known. Not that I expect the public to be grateful for it. It never is to us discoverers.”

“Have you always been a discoverer?” asked Ginger.

“Ever since I left Epsom as a boy, missy.”

“How long ago was that?” she asked.

The Taxi-Man pursed up his lips, stroked his beard, and shook his head. He was an ancient and magnificent gentleman, with a beard like old Sindbad’s, eyes as blue as any follower’s of the sea, and a cherry nose.

“I wouldn’t like to tell you, missy. You wouldn’t believe me.”

“She can believe anything out of reason,” said Gypsy proudly.

“That’s exactly what my age is,” said the Taxi-Man, “and we’ll leave it at that. But I don’t mind admitting that I was the First Hansom-Cabman in England, and shall be the Last Taxi-Driver.”

“And what have you discovered besides us?” asked Gypsy.

“London, mister,” said the Taxi-Man.

“Are you really the discoverer of London?” cried Ginger.

“That’s me, missy. A fiery boy I was, all for adventure, and Epsom was too slow for me except on Derby Day. So one fine morning I rode away on the Derby Winner, a beautiful skewbald called Snow-Flame. Out of a circus he’d come, and down the course he went doing the Polka as sweet as though he smelt sawdust. The rest were nowhere. When he got to the Winning Post he jumped clean over it and then laid down and died. Beautiful it was. Even the bookies hadn’t a dry eye between them. But stables was no place for Snow-Flame, nor subbubs for me. We met in a lane next day, me trundling an orange-box on wheels, for I’d been sent wooding, and him frisking his tail and nibbling bread-and-cheese off the hawthorns. He was feeling bucked with himself, d’ye see, because he’d unlatched his stable door with his own nose and jumped a seven-foot wall afterwards. So when we met he first stood on his head, and next came right end up and stood me on mine. After that he put me into the orange-box and backed between the shafts and curled his head under his off foreleg and winked at me. So I hitched him with a rope and off he went; the next thing I knew to remember, we’d discovered London.”

“What was it like then?” asked Ginger.

The Taxi-Man looked at her reflectively. “It were a queer place,” he said. “Golden pavements, as I dessay you’ve heard, till the County Council had them took up at the rate-payers’ expense; and any amount of green men and red lions running about on ’em—oh, any amount. There was a white bear in Hampstead too, in them days.”

“There still is,” said Gypsy.

“Is there now?” said the Taxi-Man; while Ginger exclaimed, “What do you know about it, Gypsy. You might have told me!”

The two men looked steadily at each other, and then they shook their heads.

“Let that be, missy,” said the Taxi-Man; “it’s a man’s job. To get on. There were dragons too, and a giant or so. One by one I cleared ’em out.”

“Oh, but why?” protested Ginger.

“To make London safe to live in, missy.”

“But it was safe,” said Ginger, “for the giants and dragons.”

“Ah, it wouldn’t do for us discoverers to take account of the natives,” said the Taxi-Man. “Once they’re discovered, the natives must go. It’s one of the rules, missy. Them giants and dragons was a danger.”

“To whom?” asked Ginger.

“To the Picadilly Flower-Girls,” said the Taxi-Man, looking like Saint George’s great-grandfather.

“Oh well,” said Ginger grudgingly. “But I must say London doesn’t seem half the place it was.”

“London’s all right,” said the Taxi-Man. “You can’t kill the nature of a place as easy as all that. No, not even by putting white men in the place of green ones, and taxis in the place of hansoms.”

“That must have been a great shock to you,” observed Gypsy.

“Yes, in a way it were. And a greater to Snow-Flame. We’d been reared on romance, d’ye see. We were romance, so to speak. It were all properly defined in those early days. On the one rank the Four-Wheels, on the other the Hansoms. They stood for safety, we for danger. The Growlers for Mrs. Grundy, Us for the Quixotes. Everyone knew what we were then, but who’s to know now? Whether you’re one old lady going to her solicitor’s to make her will, or nine young men on Boatrace Night, you just say ‘Taxi!’ Democracy, that’s what it is, and you can’t stop it.” He emptied his cup into his saucer, and drank it at a draught. “Well,” he said, “I must be taking my fare home.”

“Have you got a fare waiting all this time?” asked Ginger. “What a lot of twopences!”

“This fare don’t pay no tuppences,” said the Taxi-Man. “I takes him a ride round London for nothing, every fine night after working-hours. P’raps you’d like to see him?”

Gypsy and Ginger went with him to the Tube corner, and there was the taxi with the hood thrown back. Doubled up inside, as clever as a jigsaw, sat a very old red-and-white horse.

“There you are, missy,” said the Taxi-Man, “Snow-Flame! the Most Marvellous Trick Horse of This or Any Age. Winner of the Derby in——”

“What year?” asked Gypsy.

“Winner of the Derby,” repeated the Taxi-Man. “We’ll leave it at that.”

“Why do you take him for rides in the taxi?” asked Gypsy.

“Why not?” said the Taxi-Man. “Haven’t we always had our nights, him and me? Didn’t we discover London together, bit by bit, under many a full moon? Ah, missy, the fairy-tales we could tell you of the Castle that Jack Built, and of another one built by an Elephant, and then again of the End of the World, which we run across one night by pure accident in Chelsea. And though times change, shall we have no more London Nights? Taxis be blowed! Watch this.”

He undid the cab door, and Snow-Flame undid himself and got out. Then the Taxi-Man pulled out a concertina and played The Maiden’s Prayer, and Snow-Flame waltzed entrancingly all round Trafalgar Square and died at Ginger’s feet. Gypsy swears that after this he turned a somersault and climbed the Nelson Column, but Ginger was weeping as she used to weep at the end of Lord George Sanger’s Circus, so she missed it.

When she wiped her eyes the Taxi-Man and Snow-Flame had gone home.

One night after a very hot day, when the moon was at her roundest, an unusual number of Gypsy and Ginger’s friends turned up at the Weatherhouse, because everybody who was awake in London had come to dip his head in the fountains. What made Trafalgar Square still more crowded was that They had been doing something to it during the day, and had roped off the bit that wasn’t quite done, and left a little man in a box inside it—“Like a Magician in his Magic Circle,” said Gypsy.

“I wonder if he’d let me in to see him do tricks,” mused Ginger.

“It mightn’t be safe, darling. Once inside the Circle——”

“It’s not really a circle, it’s a square,” said Ginger, “and you can always get out of a square because of the cracks in the corners. It’s only rings there’s no getting out off.”

“I shouldn’t risk it, though,” said Gypsy. “And here comes Jeremy and Rags for their sausages.”

Jeremy was the Penny Hawker. He came up with his black hair streaked like dripping seaweed all over his face, and Ginger gave him a towel. When he’d done with it he passed it on to Rags, whose hair was nondescript and tufty, and looked, after its dip, like wet fur. Rags was the Rag-and-Bone Man. He was himself all rags and bones. Ginger used to give him double portions to make him fatter, and she patched his rags with lovely bits of her old frocks, so that his knees and elbows and other places had unexpected moments of bright chintzes, and butcher-blue linen, and emerald green cloth, and orange silk. But he never got any fatter, and the holes kept coming in new places. He walked about all day with a bag and a long stick with a little fork on the end, seeking for treasure-trove in the London streets. At night he would open his bag and show Ginger his findings, about which she was always very excited; it was usually more trove than treasure, but it pleased Rags greatly when she praised his cleverness.

“Fancy being able to spot a black-headed pin in the London dust,” she would say. “What an eye you must have, Rags! And what an almost perfect pin!”

“’T’s nuthin’ much,” he would say modestly. “One day I s’ll find sumpthin’ reely good.”

He was a shy hoarse little man, but he had a secret ambition which he had never told anyone until he met Ginger. His ambition was to find a diamond—a reely big diamond, as big as the Koh-i-Noor. With this object he had devoted himself from boyhood to the London Streets. “An’ it’s there, mum!” he insisted eagerly, “I know it’s there, and one day I s’ll find it.” His cheeks, which were usually grey, got pink when he talked of it.

Ginger shared his hope. “What will you do when you’ve found it, Rags?” she asked.

“I s’ll take you to the Pit of the Lyceum, mum,” said Rags, getting pinker.

“Oh!” said Ginger, overwhelmed.

Meanwhile he often made her a little present from his treasure-bag, such as a hairpin, or an empty matchbox. And she would thank him and say how useful the matchbox would be to keep the hairpin in, seeing how short her hair was.

Jeremy was on the whole a better-dressed man than Rags. This is to say, he was more orthodox. He had all the finishing touches which go to make the Perfect Nut. If he had not always a hat, he had always a hat-guard; though he sometimes lacked boots, he did not lack boot-buttons; and he was frequently without a collar but never without a stud. It was said of him in the Weatherhouse, not that he was exquisitely dressed, but that he was exquisitely appointed. He was able to be so because of his profession. His hawker’s tray was nearly as interesting to Ginger as Rag’s bag. One day it would be one thing, one day another.

“How do you decide?” asked Ginger. “I don’t believe I could make up my mind, Jeremy, between Jumping Rabbits and Dying Pigs.”

“Lord bless you, Ginger,” said the Penny Hawker, sticking his penny monocle in his eye (he was the only one who addressed her by her name, but he did it with the manners of Bond Street) “nobody chooses in Hawker’s Hall.”

“Hawker’s Hall?” inquired Gypsy. “I’ve heard of Fishmonger’s Hall.”

“No connection,” said Jeremy. “I don’t understand the Fish Trade myself, though I once had a friend in Whelks. In Hawker’s Hall we all meet at daybreak and draw lots for the trays. It’s the only way. There’d be too much jealousy otherwise. And the element of chance lends a zest to each day. Even if you’ve had the bad fortune to draw matches from Monday to Friday, you never know but what Saturday may bring you the little men who take their hats off.”

“Oh, I love them!” cried Ginger clasping her hands.

“You shall have one,” said Jeremy, “the next time I draw them. I haven’t had them this month, but luck must turn some time or other. It’s like gambling—the next deal may always bring you four aces. Here’s Tonio.”

Tonio was Chestnuts in winter and Hokey-Pokey in summer. He was Hokey-Pokey now. He always brought glamour into Trafalgar Square, no matter what the night. In winter he sang of the Italian Chestnut trees, in summer he carolled Neapolitan boat-songs over the splashing water. On the clear warm night of a full moon, such, as this, Tonio was a poet and irresistible. He was gallant, too, and generally had a lady with him. To-night it was the Strawberry Girl, and he was telling her how singularly her eyes reminded him of the stars overhead. “Wot things you do think of,” said the Strawberry Girl. A small procession trailed after them, to ask Ginger what the night was like.

“It’s the hottest night of the season,” said Ginger, free of charge. “Hokey-Pokey all round, please, Tonio.”

Gypsy promptly fetched the pillar-box. The pound which would burst it was always being pulled down like this, like the telegraph wires trying to climb out of sight of the railway-carriage window.

Tonio served Hokey-Pokey all round. Rags had never had any before. It gave his bones a frightful shock, and he had to take quick gulps of hot tea between cold gulps of hokey-pokey.

“Regard ze moon,” said Tonio, sticking a wafer in Ginger’s portion. “Ees she not beautiful, laika pineapple ice?”

“Like a yeller dimond,” gasped Rags, between agony and ecstasy.

The Taxi-Man closed an eye and said, “More like the bottom of a pewter tankard seen through Four-Ale.”

“Or a new penny,” said Jeremy.

“Like the very best thing a penny can buy,” cried Ginger, “like a penny balloon. Oh, don’t I wish I could buy the moon for a penny!”

“Why not, child?” said the Balloon Woman, coming round the corner.

The Balloon Woman was very large and round, but she was equally buoyant. Her roundnesses seemed less due to fat than air. Her puffed cheeks looked as though you might buy them for a penny apiece, if red was the colour you wanted. This was the first time Gypsy and Ginger had met her, but the others seemed to know her well. Just now she had only a few balloons tied to her apron-string, and under her arm she carried a great bowl of water which she had dipped out of the nearest fountain.

Setting it down she repeated, “Why shouldn’t you buy the moon for a penny, child? Anything can be bought for a penny, God bless me. Ask Jeremy.”

“Quite true, Mrs. Green,” said Jeremy. “A penny, as all children know, is the most complete form of wealth there is. There is no need it cannot compass and satisfy.”

“But you have first to get your penny,” said the Pavement Artist, “which often doesn’t happen once in twenty-four hours. And when you’ve got it, your difficulties have merely begun. You might not only know what penn’orth you want, but where it is to be got, and how to get there. You might decide to spend it on a peacock’s feather, which can very likely be bought for a penny in Peru. But of what use is that to you in Pimlico?”

“You confine yourself to London, P.A.,” said Jeremy. “London’s brimming over with penn’orths.”

“Even in London,” said the P.A. dreamily, “you have to spot your man. If only it were all trades to all men the job would be easy. But if you’re hungry and want a penny bun, it’s no use applying to the ’bus conductor; and if you’ve a lust for travel and want a penny ride, it’s no use asking the flower-girl; and if you’re a nature-lover and need a bunch of violets, it’s no use looking for the evening newsboy; and if you’re a reader with a passion for fairy-tales, why go to the post-office?—and if you want to speed a letter of life or death to the golden West, the rosy South, the dim blue East, or the wild grey North——”

“Drat you and your ifs!” scolded Mrs. Green. “I’ve no patience with you Artists. I deal in facts I do, and balloons is facts till they bust.”

The Punch and Judy man added scornfully, “Too many Ifs was the undoing of Hamlet. When it come to the point he couldn’t even do a penny murder.”

“I had a mother once,” said Ginger hurriedly, for she felt a certain amount of feeling in the air, “who wanted to celebrate my Elder Sister’s Twenty-first birthday by coming to the tea-party as Hamlet at four o’clock in the afternoon. My Mother was very impulsive. I had to spend all my young life in suppressing her impulses.”

Gypsy looked at his wife with renewed interest, and a very little incredulity. “I wish I’d known your Mother,” he said. “Why shouldn’t she be Hamlet at four o’clock in the afternoon on your sister’s twenty-first birthday if she wanted to be?”

“Because I was being Hamlet myself,” said Ginger, “that’s why. And two of anything’s silly. At least, it is if it’s Hamlet.”

“It isn’t,” said Gypsy, “if it’s chocolate eclairs.”

“Yes, it is,” said Ginger. “Anything less than six chocolate eclairs is very silly. Will you have a sausage?” she asked Mrs. Green.

“Not me, child. I shall want all my breath,” said Mrs. Green, emptying a little packet into her bowl and stirring it with a stick until the liquid became glutinous and frothy. Then she pulled a pipe out of her apron pocket.

“Bubbles!” cried Ginger dancing up and down. “You’re going to blow bubbles!”

“God bless the child, no!” said Mrs. Green. “Balloons.”

“Are balloons blown too?” asked Ginger.

“How else did you suppose they was made?” asked Mrs. Green.

“I never did suppose,” said Ginger meekly. “I’ve always taken balloons for granted until something happened, and they weren’t there to be taken for anything.”

Mrs. Green put the bowl of the pipe in the liquid, and the stem of it in her mouth, and puffed. In a moment a flame-coloured balloon had risen like the sun out of the sea. Everybody clapped. Before she took it off the pipe Mrs. Green secured it with a string, and added it to the bundle on her apron. Then she blew a purple one like a plum, then a peach-coloured one, then half-a-dozen pale green ones, like a cluster of grapes. It was prettier than fireworks, and more wonderful than Indian Mangoes that bloom in thirty seconds and die in fifty-nine.

“What a lovely life you have!” breathed Ginger. “I wish I were a balloon girl.”

“There’s no rest in it,” said Mrs. Green. “It’s like cooking and housework—has to be done all over again next day. The children are that demanding and that destructive. You can’t make these things to last like the pawnbroker’s balls or the Dome of Saint Paul’s.”

“What lungs Sir Christopher Wren must have had,” said Gypsy.

“And Mr. Attenborough,” said Ginger.

“Ah,” said Mrs. Green. “But it’s come and go with balloons.”

“I know,” sighed the Pavement Artist. “They come and they go like our dreams.”

“They don’t do nothing of the sort,” said Mrs. Green. “They come and they go like our dinners. But while they’re there, there they are. Dreams don’t neither come nor go. I’ve no patience with dreamers.—What’s yours, Tonio?” She had a great stock now, and was nearly at the bottom of the bowl.

“An orange, eef the Signora pleases,” said the Hokey-Pokey Man, “to reminda me my native land.”

Mrs. Green blew him an orange balloon and said as she gave it to him, “There’s all the orange-groves of Italy in that, Tonio. You, Rags?”

“A dimond one,” said Rags, and she blew him a white balloon as clear as glass. “What’s inside there,” she told Rags, “would make an African Millionaire take to Abyssinian Pearls in sheer despair.”

For the Lavender and Strawberry Girls she blew their own colours, telling the one that she now possessed enough lavender to sweeten all the laundries in London, and the other sufficient strawberries to feed the House of Commons at tea through a whole summer. The Crossing Sweeper asked for a green one, because grass needs no sweeping except by the wind, and he got one as green as the dome of Amberley on the South Downs. Jeremy chose copper, and the Balloon Woman assured him that all the slot-machines in England held less than he when he had it, like a fat brown purse, in his hands. Everybody had something blown from the Balloon Woman’s bowl. Gypsy had two, one as blue as night and one as blue as day, because he loved all the time there is, and blue beyond all the colours there are.

But when Mrs. Green turned at last to Ginger and asked her what one she’d have, Ginger, who was always as immoderate as a child, pointed up in the sky and said, “I’ll have that one, please.”

“What a nuisance you are,” said Mrs. Green. “But I suppose you must have it, or you’ll be crying for it. I expect it can be managed from Nelson’s shoulder. Just hand me your pick, Rags.”

And this surprising woman began to mount the steps of the Column, pick in hand. But she had got no further than the lions when a little voice cried through the night,

“Come out o’ that, will you? Just you leave the moon alone.”

The voice came from the roped-in enclosure in the Square where They had been doing something to London during the day. They are always doing something to London, either taking it away or putting it back, scraping it, painting it, or tarring and feathering it. It was one of Gypsy’s fears that one day They would take it all up at once and put it back in the wrong places; and it was one of Ginger’s hopes that They would.

“Think how ripping it would be,” said Ginger, “if one morning you found the Temple Gardens in the Camden Road.”

“But think how horrible it would be,” urged Gypsy, “if one morning you found the Camden Road in the Temple Gardens.”

“Don’t!” shuddered Ginger.

“Well, that’s the risk, you see. You couldn’t be sure.”

“Why does one sound all right and the other all wrong?” wondered Ginger.

She wondered about it often after this, and decided that the next time They took up the Camden Road They’d better lose it, and put apple-trees from Nowhere there instead.

But this is a digression.

“Just you leave the moon alone!” cried the wild little voice from the Night Watchman’s box in the Square.

Everybody turned to look. What they saw was a small fierce figure in an old top hat and a long-tailed coat dancing excitedly round and round the roped-in enclosure. In one hand he had a telescope, and in the other a pair of field-glasses, both of which he flourished in the direction of the Balloon Woman.

“You would, would you?” he shrilled. “Come out o’ that, you Mrs. Green.”

“Oh dear, oh dear,” said Ginger. “I’m afraid this is all my fault.” She hurried to the enclosure. “Please do be quiet and tell me why you don’t want me to have the moon.”

“The thoughtlessness of the young!” said the little man, mopping his brow with a blue handkerchief dotted with white stars. “It’s all on account of the likes o’ you that the likes o’ me has to watch the night. A nice mess she’d get into otherwise.”

“I’m so sorry. Come and have a sausage,” coaxed Ginger.

He shook his head. “Can’t,” he said shortly. “What d’you suppose the rope’s here for?”

“To keep us out,” suggested Ginger.

“To keep me in,” said the wild little man. “Set a thief to catch a thief, and one that never knew his place to keep the night in hers. Ah, many and many a time They’ve set me to watch her because They knew I’m up to all her tricks. But They have to coop me in, or I’d be off. On land They put a rope round me; on sea They put me up the mast.”

Ginger beckoned to the others, and they gathered round from the Weatherhouse. Gypsy brought the teapot with him, and the Night Watchman was given a cup across the barrier.

“What do you have to watch the night for?” asked Ginger, putting in five lumps.

“Enough o’ your sugar,” said the little man. “That’s her dodge, too, sending out all her stars when a chap’s got to try to keep his senses steady. Too much stars and sugar goes to the heart. What do I have to watch her for, the jade? A pretty question! So as nothing gets stolen, for one thing.”

Ginger put her face in her hands.

“You may well!” said the Night Watchman. “Many and many a moon has you young folk tried to steal. Sometimes you’re too sharp even for me. But the moon’s not the worst of it. It’s keeping the constellations in order, especially in August when the shooting stars are about. It goes to the heads of the old ones when those young ones gets frisking, and it takes all my time to stop the Horse from kicking the Hunter in the belt, or the Twins from parting company. ‘Move on there!’ I tell them, till I’m hoarse. Comets are disorganizing too, in their way, but we’ve generally time to prepare for them, like the Lord Mayor’s Show. And then the fixed stars want watching; they’re liable to come un-fixed.”

“Why shouldn’t they?” demanded Gypsy. “About time they did.”

“Futurist!” said the Night Watchman. “But of course it isn’t only the stars. There’s plenty else to watch the night for.”

“What?” asked Gypsy.

“Ghosts,” said the Night Watchman. “And fairies.” He checked himself, and handed back his cup abruptly. “There’s all the sounds, too, that can’t be heard by day—such as the dust settling, and the pavement cracking, and the tide turning in the Thames. Ah, the pavement takes a lot of watching, and still you can’t help the cracks coming. Sometimes one big square will split into half-a-dozen little ones before you can say Knife!”

“Would that stop it?” asked Ginger.

“It would stop anything if you said it quick enough,” said the Night Watchman, “but you never do. You may try again and again, and in the end be no better off than the fools who try to say Jack Robinson. And again, the night must be watched for the thoughts that won’t come out in the light. Some of them are too shy. But the boldness of them after dark! They take a lot of managing, for they’re a disorderly crew, bad or good. Then on land you watch the night for its moths and bats, and on sea for its wrecks and its sails. But perhaps the best thing to watch the night for, on sea or land, is morning.”

“Why?” said Gypsy.

“Because then They come and take the rope away,” said the Night Watchman.

Then he went into his box and sat on his stool and put his telescope to his eye and glared at the Pole Star. If the Pole Star had had any idea of side-slipping it abandoned it instantly, and kept as steady as the Rock of Gibraltar.

“Who do you think he is?” asked Ginger.

“Nobody knows,” said the P.A.

“I expect he’s Mr. Maeterlinck,” said Gypsy, “or Mr. Devant. But I don’t care who he is, darling, and one of these days I’ll steal the moon for you under his very nose. Meanwhile have half my balloons.”

He gave her the bluest balloon, and she hung it over her door of the Weatherhouse, and he hung the other over his. And Jeremy and the rest went back home, if they had one, and hung up theirs over their beds, if they had any.

But nearly all the balloons had disappeared by the morning.

Gypsy and Ginger first saw the Groundsel Man in the early morning. It was very early morning indeed. The moon had just gone out, and a good deal of Mother-o’-pearl was left in the sky, and there was a faint glow over Fleet Street. Of course Gypsy and Ginger couldn’t see Fleet Street, but they looked that way for the glow. The streets were quite empty when the Groundsel Man came along, and for this reason alone you couldn’t have helped noticing him. But you would have noticed him even in a crowd. His basket was slung in front of him by a strap over his shoulders, and he limped a little, but his limp, instead of being a drag, only seemed to make his step livelier, so that he came down the pavement on the light jerky hop of a chaffinch hopping down a potato-row after the digger in hope of worms.

“He’s just like the little rabbits Jeremy sells,” said Ginger.

“If you could look under his trousers,” said Gypsy, “you’d find that instead of feet he has two spiral springs.”

“It’s quite easy to look under his trousers,” said Ginger, “and he prefers not to wear socks.”

“Another Simple Lifer,” said Gypsy. Most of their friends were.

“But he has got a pretty hat,” said Ginger. “I wish I’d got one like it.”

His hat was the chief reason why you’d have to notice the Groundsel Man in a crowd. It was a straw hat of all sorts of shapes and colours, with no top to the crown and whiskers round the brim. And it was weighed down by a glorious wreath of buttercups. The Groundsel Man’s basket was also half buttercups, as well as groundsel and chickweed, and in one hand he had a short thick thorn-stick, as black and shiny as an old clay pipe, and in the other he carried a great branch of white wild roses like a banner. As he stepped by he said,

“Good morning, sir and ma’am. A fine night it’s been and a finer day ’twill be.”

“Are you telling us that?” said Gypsy doubtfully.

“I am, sir. You’re clever little people,” said the Groundsel Man cheerily, “but it’s not the likes o’ me you can tell about the weather. My kind needs no weatherhouses.”

“Not even in London?” said Ginger, bringing the teapot.

“I don’t live in Lunnon, ma’am. I only passes through. Lunnon’s a cage, she is. But her’ll never ketch me.”

“Where do you live?” asked Ginger, filling a cup for him; and Gypsy offered him his tobacco pouch.

“Thank you, ma’am. Thank you, sir. I lives anywheres that a bird may, ma’am, and after all that’s anywheres there is. In sedges and tree-tops and the flat tops of hills and hedgerows and the faces of clifts.”

“And the sky?” asked Ginger so eagerly that Gypsy surreptitiously tied a string round her ankle to haul her in by if she flew up too suddenly.

“As oft as not,” said the Groundsel Man sipping his cup and crumbling his bread. More than half the crumbs fell to the ground, and he let them lie.

“Why do you come to London at all?” asked Gypsy.

“To open the bird-cages, sir.”

“What sport,” said Gypsy. “Do you ever get caught?”

“Very seldom, sir. I does it after dark. I takes note of my street by day, and by night I sets it free. Sometimes the cage is hung outside the house, and then it’s easy. But other times it stands inside the window, and then I has to force the catch. I’m doing Lunnon street by street. When her’s empty I’ll do Manchester. But so fast as I empty her, her fills up like Philemon’s pitcher.”

“What sort of birds do you let out?” asked Ginger.

“Every sort, ma’am. Canaries and parrots and redpoles and skylarks—yes, ma’am, I’ve known houses as even keeps skylarks in cages. Once I found a Red Cardinal in Bethnal Green. I hopes he flew back to South Ameriky, but if not there’s warm spots in Hampshire.”

“You’ll have a grand time,” said Gypsy, passing him the matches, “the night you do the Zoo.”

The Groundsel Man puffed hard, and disappeared entirely behind a cloud of smoke; out of which he piped shrilly, “Flamingoes!” The cry was like a thin streak of lightning passing through a thunder-cloud.

Ginger asked, “What happens when you do get caught?”

“I sells them a bunch of groundsel for their dickies,” he said. “Oh, that’s all right, ma’am. The birds doesn’t suffer, neither way. And so soon as the basket’s empty, back I goes to fill it up.”

“Back where?” asked Ginger.

“Anywheres,” he said vaguely.

“Do you sell buttercups too?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. Buttercups is my pleasure. Well, so is the groundsel too, mine and the birds’. But this sort of gold can’t be sold for pence to the keepers of cages. They’ll sometimes cage robins, ma’am, robins that’ll come into your house for company like your brother. But what sort of company is one in a cage? Will they play pretty like the Robin of Cold-harbour?”

“Who’s he?” asked Gypsy.

“A little chap I knows. He goes to church on week-days. First time I seed him he was sitting in the pulpit singing fit to bust, so sweet as any parson.”

Gypsy said doubtfully, “Do parsons?”

“Don’t they, sir? I supposed they did, else why do the folk go? But I never heard one myself. It’s mostly some other bird I’m listening to o’ Sundays, the daws at their games round the chalk-pits, or the plovers swooping on the Downs, or the larks you can’t see for the air in between. But when my Robin’s done his Glory-Glory, down he hops to a pewback, and so hops all down the aisle like a stone on a pond, skipping one pew at each hop. And when he gets to the end he thinks, What can I do next? and he looks at the stained glass windows and Pooh! cries he. And he chooses a clear pane of glass under a Saint, and flies up and sits against it with the sun on his breast as red as a ruby. And there he sings Glory-Glory all over again, and out he flies. Would you cage that bird, ma’am?”

“I wouldn’t cage anything!” said Ginger angrily, “and I’m going to Manchester by the next train.”

Gypsy took another reef in his string.

“Well, it’s time somebody did,” said Ginger.

“Don’t you fret, ma’am,” said the Groundsel Man. “I’ll get there all in good season. Would you like some buttercups?”

“Yes, please,” said Ginger, running for a bowl, which she filled at the fountain.

The Groundsel Man put his buttercups into it carefully, and then with a sort of hop and flutter he was up on the roof of the weatherhouse, perched for a moment on the chimney, where he stuck his branch of wild-rose. The glow from Fleet Street was now so strong that the small white burnet blossoms looked like puffs of golden smoke. Then he gave another flutter and disappeared.

Ginger ran round the corner to catch him, but when she got there she could see nothing but the sparrows quarrelling round the Nelson Column, and the pigeons flying from the spire of St. Martin’s to the Dome of the National Gallery.