All right!
The priest came back to the church. The Gypsy chants to him to make haste, for sooner or later the end of all things approaches. Straightway the Gypsy opened the sack, and the priest got into it. The Gypsy took all the priest’s money, and hid it in his pocket.
‘Good! now you are mine.’
When he closed the sack, the priest was in a great fright. ‘My God! what will become of me? I know not what sort of a being that is, whether God Himself or an angel.’
The Gypsy straightway drags the priest down the steps. The priest cries that it hurts him, that he should go gently with him, for he is all broken already; that half an hour of that will kill him, for his bones are all broken already.
Well, he dragged him along the nave of the church, and pitched him down before the door; and he put a lot of thorns there to run into the priest’s flesh. He dragged him backwards and forwards through the thorns, and the thorns stuck into him. When the Gypsy saw that the priest was [[48]]more dead than alive, he opened the sack, and left him there.
The Gypsy went home, and threw off his disguise, and put it on the fire, that no one might say he had done the deed. The Gypsy had more than eight hundred silver pieces. So he and his wife and his children were glad that they had such a lot of money; and if the Gypsy has not died with his wife and his children, perhaps he is living still.
In the morning when the sexton comes to ring the bell, he sees a sack in front of the church. The priest was quite dead. When he opened it and saw the priest, he was in a great fright. ‘What on earth took our priest in there?’ He runs into the town, made a great outcry, that so and so has happened. The poor folks came and the gentry to see what was up: all the candles in the church were burning. So they buried the parson decently. If he is not rotten he is whole. May the devils still be eating him. I was there, and heard everything that happened.
The briefest epitome will serve of our third Gypsy version, from Hungary, Dr. Friedrich Müller’s No. 1, which is very coarse and very disconnected:—‘Somewhere was, somewhere was not, lucky, Golden God! somewhere was, somewhere was not, a poor Gypsy.’ An old woman tells him, ‘Go into yonder castle, and there is the lady; and take from her the ring, and put it on thine own hand, and turn it thrice, then so much meal and bread will be to thee that thou wilt not know what to do with it.’… He wins twenty-four wagon-loads of money for seducing the nobleman’s wife, which he achieves by luring away the nobleman with a corpse. The Gypsy then kills his children and his wife; cheats an old woman of her money; cures and marries the king’s daughter; leaves her, because she will not go and sell the nails he manufactures; and finally marries a Gypsy girl, who pleases him much better.
Our next version, ‘Jack the Robber,’ is from South Wales, told to Mr. Sampson by Cornelius Price. It is as good as the last one is bad, but like it somewhat Rabelaisian. The following is a summary of the first half, the latter (our No. 68) being a variant of Dasent’s ‘Big Peter and Little Peter’:—A poor widow has a son, Jack, who ‘took to smoking when he was twelve, and got to robbing the master’s plough-socks to take ’em to the blacksmith’s to sell ’em to rise bacca.’ So the farmer makes the mother send Jack away from home; and Jack comes to a big gentleman’s hall. This gentleman is the head of eleven robbers, and Jack, after cunningly relieving [[49]]one of them of £11, joins the band, and in six months ‘got a cleverer robber than what the master hisself was.’ So, with the money he has made, he sets off for his mother’s, meets the farmer, tells him he has been prentice to a robber, and, to test his skill, is set to steal two sheep in succession. He does so by the familiar expedients of, first, a boot here and a boot there, and, next, baaing like a lost sheep. Then Jack is set to take the middlemost sheet from underneath the farmer and his missus, and achieves it by ‘loosing a dead body down the chimley,’ which the farmer shoots dead, as he fancies, and goes off to bury.
The fifth and last version, ‘The Great Thief,’ is from North Wales, told by Matthew Wood, and is thus summarised by Mr. Sampson:—‘Hard by a parson lived a thief. The parson told the thief, “To-morrow my man goes to the butcher with a sheep. Steal it, and you shall have such and such money.” Thief gets a pair of new boots, and places one on one stile, the other on another further on. Man sees first boot and leaves it, finds other, ties up sheep, and goes back for the first. Thief steals sheep. The parson says again, “I want you to steal my wife’s ring from her finger and the sheet from under her. If you can’t, I shall behead you.” Thief makes dummy man, and props it against wall. Parson shoots it, comes out, and buries it in well. Meanwhile thief visits wife, pretending to be parson, and takes her ring and sheet for safety. Parson returns and discovers the trick.’
Though not, at least but very conjecturally, a Gypsy version, the following version is still worth citing. It is from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, vol. iii. (1861), pp. 388–390:—‘An intelligent-looking boy, aged 16, a native of Wisbech in Cambridgeshire; at 13 apprenticed to a tailor; in three months’ time ran away; went home again for seven months, then ran away again, and since a vagrant. Had read Windsor Castle, Tower of London, etc. He gives account of amusements in casual wards:—
‘ “We told stories sometimes, romantic tales some; others blackguard kind of tales, about bad women; and others about thieving and roguery; not so much about what they’d done themselves, as about some big thief that was very clever and could trick anybody. Not stories such as Dick Turpin or Jack Sheppard, or things that’s in history, but inventions. I used to say when I was telling a story—for I’ve told one story that I invented till I learnt it. [I give this story to show what are the objects of admiration with these vagrants[18]]:—
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