A GIPSY PARTY.
“Come stain your cheeks with nut or berry,
You’ll find a gipsy’s life is merry.”—GIPSY GLEE.
I DO not know what imp of mischief could have put such a fancy into the dreaming head of Mrs. Carnaby, except Puck—but on a fine morning in August she awoke with a determination to get up a gipsy party, and have a day’s pleasure “under the green-wood tree.” She opened her mind therefore to Mr. C——, as soon as he had opened his eyes, and before breakfast they had arranged the whole affair. Hornsey Wood was stale, and Norwood was rejected, for the very paradoxical reason that it was such a haunt for Gipsies; and Mrs. Carnaby meant to take even her youngest children. After a good deal of debating, Hainault was the Forest fixed upon;—it lay so handy to Whitechapel, and the redletter day was marked to be the Wednesday in the following week, because then Master Carnaby would only lose half a day’s schooling.
Accordingly, on the Wednesday, the Dryads of Wanstead were startled by the rumble of a well-laden tax-cart up that avenue which once led to a princely mansion; and the vehicle at last stopped, and set down its insides and outsides just where the lines of trees branch off into another verdant alley. “It was,” Mrs. Carnaby remarked, “a delicious green spot, and very handy to the Green Man for getting porter.” Mrs. C—— was assisted out of the cart; and then Miss C—— was lifted out by Mr. Hodges; and then the children were lifted out by the Mother; and then the nursemaid, an awkward plainlooking girl that nobody helped, tumbled out. In the mean time, Master C—— jumped out, all agog after blackberrying and birdnesting; and had swarmed half up a tree before his mother’s vigilance discovered, at a single glance, that he was tearing his trowsers, and had his best clothes on. This was a bad setting out for the boy; and the horse was not better, for directly he got out of harness, and felt himself free and at grass, after two or three preliminary kicks and plunges, it occurred to him to indulge in a roll, and so he rolled over a pigeon pie that was unfortunately unpacked, and finished by getting very much up with his fore-legs in a basket of ginger beer. But it was only a moment of enthusiasm; and, like other old nags, he betook himself to eating his green grass salad as gravely as a judge. None of the performers were fortunate in their debut. The first thing Mrs. Carnaby did in her hurry to save the pop, was to pop down one of the children on the basket of knives and forks; but it was a sharp child and soon got up again: and the first thing the other twin did was to trip over a stump, and fall, as Betty nursemaid said, “with its face in a fuz.” The first thing Mr. Hodges did, was to take Miss Carnaby round the waist and give her a smacking kiss; in return for which, as her first act, she gave him a playful push, that sent him, with his white ducks, into a muddy miniature pond, that had recently been stirred up by a cow in search of a cold bath. The first thing that Mr. C—— did was to recommend some brandy as a preventive against catching cold; but the last thing the brandy bottle had done had been to stay at home in the cupboard. Mr. Hodges, therefore, walked off to the Green Man for his health’s sake; and Master Carnaby sneaked off, nobody knew where, for the sake of blackberries;—while the Nursemaid, for the sake of society, took a romantic walk with the two twins, and a strange footman. Gipsies are a wandering race, and all the performers topped their parts; the very horse roamed away like a horse that had neither parish nor settlement: and Mr. Carnaby would have gone roaming after him, if his Wife and Daughter had not hung round his neck and made him swear not to leave ’em till the others returned, which was afterwards softened down to taking a little walk, provided he didn’t go out of sight and hearing. In the mean time Mrs. and Miss C—— laid the cloth, and began to review the eatables, not without lamenting over the smash of the pigeon pie; and when they came to plan their second course they found that the chief remove, a cold round of beef, had been pinned on the way down by a favourite bull-dog, that Master Carnaby had smuggled into the party. Luckily for the dog, he had also gone roving, with the whole forest before him, as naturally as if he had belonged to Bampfylde Moore Carew, the King of the Gipsies.
COIL AND RECOIL.
DEADLY NIGHTSHADE.
Mrs. Carnaby was one of those characters emphatically called fidgets; she never rested till each individual came back, and she never rested when they did. Mr. C. was the first to return, and not in the first of tempers. He had been done out of his long-anticipated rural walk by setting his foot, before he had gone a hundred yards, on a yard of snake, and it had frightened him so that Mrs. Carnaby expected “it would turn his whole mash of blood, and give him the yellow jaundice.” Mr. Hodges came in second, but to the impatient eye of Miss C. certainly did not proceed from the Green Man with the straightness of a bullet from a rifle. Master Carnaby was a good third, for he had been well horse-whipped, just as he had got three little red blackberries and five thorns in his fingers, by a gentleman who did not approve of his trespassing upon his grounds. Boxer the bull-dog was fourth; he came back on three-legs, with his brindle well peppered with number six by the gamekeeper, to cure him of worrying park rabbits. In fact, poor Boxer, as Mrs. C. exclaimed, “was bleeding like a pig,” and the grateful animal acknowledged her compassionate notice by going and rubbing his shot hide against her shot silk, in return for which he got a blow quite hard enough to shiver the stick of something between a parasol and an umbrella. As for the nurse-maid and the twins they did not return for an hour, to the infinite horror of the mother; but just as they were all sitting down to dinner Betsey appeared with her charge, walked off their feet, with their “pretty mouths all besmeared” with blue and red juice; but no one of the party was botanist enough to tell whether the berries they were munching were hips and haws, or bilberries, or deadly nightshade, but maternal anxiety made sure it was the “rank pison.” Accordingly dinner was postponed, and they set to get up an extempore fire to make the kettle hot, and as soon as the water was warm enough, these “two pretty babes” were well drenched, and were soon as perfectly uncomfortable as they had been two months before in a rough steam trip to Margate. As soon as peace was restored it transpired, from an examination of the children, and a very cross examination of the nurse-maid, that they had met with a real gipsy woman in the forest who had told Betty’s fortune, but had omitted to prognosticate that her mistress would give her warning on the spot, and that her gipsying would end, as it actually did, in finding herself suddenly out of place in the middle of a forest. Like other servants, when they lose a comfortable situation, “some natural tears she shed,” but did not wipe them soon, as did “our general mother,” for the very excellent reason that she had spread her pocket handkerchief on the ground to sit upon, somewhere between Wanstead and Walthamstow, and had left it as a waif to the lord of the manor.
BACKING OUT OF GOING TO MARKET.
Dinner time then came again, to the especial delight of the two empty children, though, thanks to the horse and dog, it was principally broken victuals. But on sitting down and counting heads Master C. had a second time absconded during the last bustle; and, as his mother could not touch a morsel for anxiety, Mr. Carnaby was obliged to set out fasting to look for him, and had soon the satisfaction of finding him sitting hatless crying in a wet ditch, and scraping a suit of brown off a suit of blue with an old oyster shell. His father, in the first transport of anger and hunger, gave him what boys call “a regular larruping,” then a good rubbing down with a bunch of fern, and then brought him back to the cold collation, with the comfortable threat that he should go without his dinner. As soon as the culprit could explain for sobbing, he told them that “he had gone for a little walk, like, and saw the most capital donkey with a saddle and bridle feeding wild about the forest as if he belonged to nobody, and he just got on him like, like they used to do at Margate; and then the donkey set off full tear, and never stopped till he came to a tent of gipsies in the middle of the wood; and they all set upon him, and swore at him like anything for running away with their donkey; and then all of a sudden he lost his hat and his handkerchief, and his money out of his pockets like conjuring; then they told him to run for his life, and so he did, and as for the mud it was all along of jumping over a hedge that had no other side to it.” This intelligence threw Mrs. Carnaby into an agony of horror which could only be pacified by their immediately packing up and removing, eatables and all, to a less lonesome place by the side of the road, an operation that was performed by their all pulling and pushing at the cart, as the horse had taken French leave of absence.
It was now Miss Carnaby’s turn to be discomfited: her retiring disposition made her wince under the idea of dining in public; for being market day at Romford, they were over-looked by plenty of farmers and pig butchers: consequently, after a very miffy dialogue with her mother, the young lady took herself off, as she was desired, with “her romantical notions,” to a place of more solitude, and Mr. Hodges, as in gallantry bound, postponed his dinner till his tea to keep her company. In the mean time, Betsey, who had been sent up to the Green Man for the porter, returned with the empty tankard, and a terrified tale of being “cotch’d hold on by a ruffian in the wood, that had drunk up all the beer to all their very good healths.” The first impulse of Mr. Carnaby was to jump up to do justice on the vagabond, but Mrs. C—— had the presence of mind to catch hold of his coat-flaps so abruptly, that before he could well feel his legs, he found himself sitting in a large plum pie, which the children had just set their hearts upon; of course it did not mend his temper to hear the shout from a dozen ragged boys who were looking on; and in the crisis of his vexation, he vented such a fervent devil’s blessing on gipsy parties, and all that proposed them, that Mrs. Carnaby was obliged to take it up, and to tell him sharply, what in reality was true enough, that “if people did have gipsy parties, it didn’t follow that their stupid husbands was to sit down on plum pies.” Heaven knows to what size and shape this little quarrel might have ripened, but for the appearance of Miss Carnaby, who, with a terrified exclamation sat herself down, and after a vain attempt to recover, went off into a strong fit of what her mother called “kicking hysterics.” The cause was soon explained by the appearance of Mr. Hodges, with one eye poached black, and a dog-bite in the calf of his leg, because “he had only stood looking on at two men setting wires for rabbits, thinking to himself if he watched them well he could learn how to do it.” Fortunately, Miss Carnaby came to just in time to concur with her father and Mr. Hodges in the opinion, that the best thing they could all do was to pack up and go home, but which was stoutly combated by Mrs. Carnaby, who insisted that she was resolved to take tea in a wood for once in her life, and she was seconded by the children and Master C——, who said they hadn’t had any pleasure yet. It was an unanswerable argument; sticks were collected, a fire was made, the kettle boiled, the tea-things were set in order, the bread and butter was cut, and pleasure began to smile on the gipsy party so placidly that Mr. Hodges was encouraged to begin playing “In my Cottage near a Wood,” on the key bugle, but was obliged to break off in the middle, on finding that it acted as a bugle call to a corps of observation, who came and stood round to see “Rural Felicity.” Mrs. Carnaby, however, was happy; but “there is many a slip between the tea-cup and the lip.” She was in the triumphant fact of pouring the hot water on her best souchong, in her best china tea-pot, when a very well-charged gun went off just on the other side of the park palings, and Mrs. Carnaby had not been born like her Grace, old Sarah of Marlborough, “before nerves came in fashion.” The tea-kettle dropped from her hand upon the tea-pot, which it dashed to atoms, and then lay on its side, hot watering the daisies and the dandelions that had the luck to grow near it. “Misfortunes never come single,” and the gun, therefore, acted like a double one in its inflictions; for no sooner did Boxer recognise its sound than he jumped up, and with an alarming howl dashed through the rest of the tea service, as if he had absorbed another ounce of number six: a fresh shout from the bystanders welcomed this new disaster, and with the true spirit of “biting a bitten cur,” they began to heap embarrassments on the disconcerted gipsyers. They kept pitching sticks into the fire till it grew a bonfire, and made cockshies of the remaining crockery; some audacious boys even helped themselves to bread and butter, as if on the principle that the open air ought to keep open house. As there were too many assailants to chastise, the only remedy was to pack up and take to the road as fast as they could, with a horse which they found with two broken knees, the consequence of his being too curious in the construction of a gravel-pit. “You may say what you like,” said Mr. Carnaby, in his summing up, “but for my part I must say of gipsying, that it’s impossible to take to it without being regularly ‘done brown.’”
THE FORTUNE HUNTER.
COCKLE v. CACKLE.
THOSE who much read advertisements and bills,
Must have seen puffs of Cockle’s Pills,
Call’d Anti-bilious—
Which some Physicians sneer at, supercilious,
But which we are assured, if timely taken,
May save your liver and bacon;
Whether or not they really give one ease,
I, who have never tried,
Will not decide;
But no two things in union go like these—
Viz.—Quacks and Pills—save Ducks and Pease.
Now Mrs. W. was getting sallow,
Her lilies not of the white kind, but yellow,
And friends portended was preparing for
A human Pâté Périgord;
She was, indeed, so very far from well,
Her Son, in filial fear, procured a box
Of those said pellets to resist Bile’s shocks,
And—tho’ upon the ear it strangely knocks—
To save her by a Cockle from a shell!
But Mrs. W., just like Macbeth,
Who very vehemently bids us “throw
Bark to the Bow-wows,” hated physic so,
It seem’d to share “the bitterness of Death:”
Rhubarb—Magnesia—Jalap, and the kind—
Senna—Steel—Assa-fœtida, and Squills—
Powder or Draught—but least her throat inclined
To give a course to Boluses or Pills:
No—not to save her life, in lung or lobe,
For all her lights or all her liver’s sake,
Would her convulsive thorax undertake,
Only one little uncelestial globe!
’Tis not to wonder at, in such a case,
If she put by the pill-box in a place
For linen rather than for drugs intended—
Yet for the credit of the pills let’s say
After they thus were stow’d away,
Some of the linen mended;
But Mrs. W. by disease’s dint,
Kept getting still more yellow in her tint,
When lo! her second son, like elder brother,
Marking the hue on the parental gills,
Brought a new charge of Anti-tumeric Pills,
To bleach the jaundiced visage of his Mother—
Who took them—in her cupboard—like the other.
“Deeper and deeper, still,” of course,
The fatal colour daily grew in force;
Till daughter W. newly come from Rome,
Acting the self-same filial, pillial, part,
To cure Mamma, another dose brought home
Of Cockles;—not the Cockles of her heart!
These going where the others went before,
Of course she had a very pretty store;
And then—some hue of health her cheek adorning,
The Medicine so good must be,
They brought her dose on dose, which she
Gave to the upstairs cupboard, “night and morning.”
Till wanting room at last, for other stocks,
Out of the window one fine day she pitch’d
The pillage of each box, and quite enrich’d
The feed of Mister Burrell’s hens and cocks,—
A little Barber of a by-gone day,
Over the way
Whose stock in trade, to keep the least of shops,
Was one great head of Kemble,—that is, John,
Staring in plaster, with a Brutus on,
And twenty little Bantam fowls—with crops.
Little Dame W. thought when through the sash
She gave the physic wings,
To find the very things
So good for bile, so bad for chicken rash,
For thoughtless cock, and unreflecting pullet!
But while they gathered up the nauseous nubbles,
Each peck’d itself into a peck of troubles,
And brought the hand of Death upon its gullet.
They might as well have addled been, or ratted,
For long before the night—ah woe betide
The Pills! each suicidal Bantam died
Unfatted!
Think of poor Burrell’s shock,
Of Nature’s debt to see his hens all payers,
And laid in death as Everlasting Layers,
With Bantam’s small Ex-Emperor, the Cock,
In ruffled plumage and funereal hackle,
Giving, undone by Cockle, a last Cackle!
To see as stiff as stone, his unlive stock,
It really was enough to move his block.
Down on the floor he dash’d, with horror big,
Mr. Bell’s third wife’s mother’s coachman’s wig;
And with a tragic stare like his own Kemble,
Burst out with natural emphasis enough,
And voice that grief made tremble,
Into that very speech of sad Macduff—
“What!—all my pretty chickens and their dam,
At one fell swoop!—
Just when I’d bought a coop
To see the poor lamented creatures cram!”
After a little of this mood,
And brooding over the departed brood,
With razor he began to ope each craw,
Already turning black, as black as coals;
When lo! the undigested cause he saw—
“Pison’d by goles!”
To Mrs. W.’s luck a contradiction,
Her window still stood open to conviction;
And by short course of circumstantial labour,
He fix’d the guilt upon his adverse neighbour;—
Lord! how he rail’d at her: declaring now,
He’d bring an action ere next Term of Hilary,
Then, in another moment, swore a vow,
He’d make her do pill-penance in the pillory!
She, meanwhile distant from the dimmest dream
Of combating with guilt, yard-arm or arm-yard,
Lapp’d in a paradise of tea and cream;
When up ran Betty with a dismal scream—
“Here’s Mr. Burrell, Ma’am, with all his farm-yard!”
Straight in he came, unbowing and unbending,
With all the warmth that iron and a barber
Can harbour;
To dress the head and front of her offending,
The fuming phial of his wrath uncorking;
In short, he made her pay him altogether,
In hard cash, very hard, for ev’ry feather,
Charging of course, each Bantam as a Dorking;
Nothing could move him, nothing make him supple,
So the sad dame unpocketing her loss,
Had nothing left but to sit hands across,
And see her poultry, “going down ten couple.”
HALFPENNY HATCH.
Now birds by poison slain,
As venom’d dart from Indian’s hollow cane,
Are edible; and Mrs. W.’s thrift,—
She had a thrifty vein,—
Destined one pair for supper to make shift,—
Supper as usual at the hour of ten:
But ten o’clock arrived and quickly pass’d,
Eleven—twelve—and one o’clock at last,
Without a sign of supper even then!
At length, the speed of cookery to quicken,
Betty was called, and with reluctant feet,
Came up at a white heat—
“Well, never I see chicken like them chicken!
My saucepans, they have been a pretty while in ’em!
Enough to stew them, if it comes to that,
To flesh and bones, and perfect rags; but drat
Those Anti-biting Pills! there is no bile in ’em!”