Gipsy Lies
Gipsies are certainly good sportsmen, after their own fashion. But one seldom hears of a gipsy shooting with a gun; the gun speaks too loudly. The gipsy makes sport with dogs, ferrets, and nets. He takes no open risks; he holds it to be a disgraceful thing to be caught red-handed. And if caught he never makes confession. No matter how red his hands, there is always an excuse. His horse is found feeding, perhaps, on the farmer's crops. Then the horse must have broken loose unbeknown. Or his dog crosses the road, leveret in mouth. Then, "He picked un up dead, killed by a stoat what I seed a-sniffin' about." His dog has snapped up a sitting partridge. "It must be one as they beggarin' foxes 'ave killed." Or the gipsy himself, hunting a rabbit in a hedge, is taken in the act of knocking over the rabbit with his stick. All was done in mistake for a rat. The keeper remarks that he has lost a fine clutch of eggs—olive-brown eggs: he hints that the gipsy knows something about it. Innocently comes the question: "They sart o' eggs be pison, bain't they?" If caught with nets and ferrets on a rabbit burrow, a fine tale he has to tell of poachers who ran away at his approach, leaving all their tackle.
A keeper, who had strict orders to allow no gipsies to stop on his ground, one day came across a strong swarm, and saw clearly that they intended to stay the night. But in reply to his marching orders, they pleaded that they wished to stay only long enough to make some tea; they promised they would be gone by the time the keeper returned, in a couple of hours. So he went away, but went no farther than behind the nearest hedge: whence he heard himself described in a picturesque and blood-curdling fashion, and heard the declaration also that the gipsies had no intention of budging an inch for such a blue-livered, red-nosed piece of pulp as he. Thereupon the keeper took a run and a jump, and landed his eighteen stone self and his leaded stick in the gipsies' midst, sending their pots and pans far-flying. The gipsies snatched burning sticks from the fire, and a desperate fight began, but they soon had enough of that eighteen stone of angry keeper.
