Accordingly, we went over to the living wagons and tents and found several women busily engaged in preparing for the evening meal; one was dexterously manipulating a frying-pan, another tended the fire, and so on.
I was invited to partake of the meal with a family whose home was a tent. In the way of food there was bread and jam, German sausage and bread, and bowls of tea. As I was the guest I was offered for a seat a boot-repairing iron upon which a piece of sacking was placed to modify its undesirable qualities. I imagine it would take years of practice to enable one to sit with any degree of comfort on a boot-repairing iron, but I determined to make the best of it and to appear as though I liked it and had sat upon nothing but boot-irons all my life. However, the fumes from the coke fire hard by proved almost too much for me and I was in danger of falling from my precarious perch. My friends evidently noticed this as they made a less uncertain seat for me by upturning an empty bucket and covering the bottom with an old coat as a cushion.
“There is in all this cold and hollow world
No fount of deep, strong, deathless love,
Save that within a mother’s heart.”
Mrs. Hemans.
Almost everyone has some recollection of the brown tents of the gypsy fraternity, which, at longer or shorter intervals, may be seen dotted here and there upon the commons. Comparatively few, however, have any close-range acquaintance even with the exterior of these primitive dwellings, and fewer still have any idea of the arrangement of the interior. In many of the poorest tents of the gypsies of southern England there really is no arrangement, in fact, there is almost “no nothing,” as someone with a touch of pathetic facetiousness has described their condition, but the tent in which I now found myself belonged to a family of genuine Romanies and differed somewhat from those of the poorer tent-dwellers.