“To our foes we leave a shame! disgrace can never die;
Their sons shall blush to hear a name still blackened with a lie.”
Their miserable condition, the persecution, misrepresentation, and the treatment they are receiving are due entirely to their own evil-doing—lying, cheating, robbing, and murder bring their own reward. The Gipsies of to-day are drinking the dregs of the cups they had mixed for others. The sly wink of the eye intended to touch the heart of the innocent and simple has proved to be the electric spark that has reached heaven, and brought down the vengeance of Jehovah upon their heads. The lies proceeding from their bad hearts have turned out to be a swarm of wasps settling down upon their own pates; their stolen goods have been smitten with God’s wrath; the horses, mules, and donkeys in their unlawful possession are steeds upon which the Gipsies are riding to hell; and the fortune-telling cards are burning the fingers of the Gipsy women; in one word, the curse of God is following them in every footstep on account of their present sins, and not on account of their past traditions. Immediately they alter their course of life, and “cease to do evil and learn to do well”—no matter whether they are Jews or barbarians, bond or free—the blessing of God will follow, and they will begin to thrive and prosper.
Smoking and eating tobacco adds another leaden weight to those already round their neck, and it helps to bow them down to the ground—a short black pipe, the ranker and oftener it has been used the more delicious will be the flavour, and the better they will like it. When their “baccy” is getting “run out,” the short pipe is handed round to the company of Gipsies squatting upon the ground, without any delicacy of feeling, for all of them to “have a pull.” Spittoons are things they never use. White, scented, cambric pocket-handkerchiefs are not often brought into request upon their “lovely faces.” They prefer allowing the bottom of the dresses the honour of appearing before his worship “the nose.” Nothing pleases the
Gipsies better than to give them some of the weed. I saw a poor, dying, old Gipsy woman the other day. Nothing seemed to please her so much, although she could scarcely speak, as to delight in referring to the sins of her youth, of a kind before referred to, and no present was so acceptable to her as “a nounce of baccy.” She said she “would rather have it than gold,” and I “could not have pleased her better.” I doubt whether she lived to smoke it. I think I am speaking within the mark when I state that fully three-fourths of the Gipsy women in this country are inveterate smokers. It is a black, burning shame for us to have such a state of things in our midst. In nine cases out of ten the children of drunken, smoking women will turn out to be worthless scamps and vagabonds, and a glance at the Gipsies will prove my statements.
Eternity will reveal their deeds of darkness—murders, immorality, torturous and heart-rending treatment to their poor slaves of women, beastly and murderous brutality to their poor children. There is a terrible reckoning coming for the “Gipsy man,” who can chuckle to his fowls, and kick, with his iron-soled boot, his poor child to death; who can warm and shelter his blackbird, and send the offspring of his own body to sleep upon rotten straw and the dung-heap, covered over with sticks and rags, through which light, hail, wind, rain, sleet, and snow can find its way without let or hinderance; who can take upon his knees a dog and fondle it in his bosom, and, at the same time, spit in his wife’s face with oaths and cursing, and send her out in the snow on a piercing-cold winter’s day, half clad and worse fed, with child on her back and basket on her arm, to practise the art of double-dyed lying and deception on honest, simple people, in order to bring back her ill-gotten gains to her semi-clad hovel, on which to fatten her “lord and master,” by half-cleaned knuckle-bones, ham-shanks, and pieces of bacon that fall from the “rich man’s table.”
The following is a specimen of house-dwelling Gipsies in the Midlands I have visited. In the room downstairs there were a broken-down old squab, two rickety old chairs, and a three-legged table that had to be propped against the wall, and a rusty old poker, with a smoking fire-place. The Gipsy father was a strong man, not over fond of work; he had been in prison once; the mother, a strong Gipsy woman of the old type, marked with small-pox, and plenty of tongue—by the way, I may say I have not yet seen a dumb and deaf Gipsy. She turned up her dress sleeves and showed me how she had “made the blood run out of another Gipsy woman for hitting her child.” As she came near to me exhibiting her fisticuffing powers, I might have been a little nervous years ago; but dealing with men and things in a rough kind of fashion for so many years has taken some amount of nervousness of this kind out of me.
It may be as well to remark here that the Gipsy women can do their share of fighting, and are as equally pleased to have a stand-up fight as the Gipsy men are. One of these Gipsy women lives with a man who is not a thorough Gipsy, who spends a deal of his time under lock and key on account of his poaching inclinations; and other members of this large family are on the same kind of sliding scale, and not one of whom can read or write.
It is not pleasant to say strong things about clergymen, for whom I have the highest respect; nevertheless, there are times when respect for Christ’s church, duty to country, love for the children and anxiety for their eternal welfare, compels you to step out of the beaten rut to expose, though with pain, wrong-doing. In a day and Sunday school-yard connected with the Church of England, not one hundred miles from London, there are to be seen—and I am informed by them, except during the hop-picking season, that it is their camping-ground, and has been for years—one van, in which there are man, wife, young woman, and a daughter of about fourteen years of age; the young woman
and daughter sleep in a kind of box under the man and his wife. In another part of the yard is a Gipsy tent, where God’s broad earth answers the purpose of a table, and a “batten of straw” serves as a bed. There is a woman, two daughters, one of whom is of marriageable age and the other far in her teens, and a youth I should think about sixteen years of age. I should judge that the mother and her two daughters sleep on one bed at one end of the tent and the youth at the other; there is no partition between them, and only about seven feet of space between each bed of litter. In another tent there is man, wife, and one child. When I was there, on the Sunday afternoon, they were expecting the Gipsy “to come home to his tent drunk and wake the baby.” In another tent there was a Gipsy with his lawful wife and three children. One of the Gipsy women in the yard frequently came home drunk, and I have seen her smoking with a black pipe in her mouth three parts tipsy. Now, I ask my countrymen if this is the way to either improve the habits and morals of the Gipsies themselves, or to set a good example to day and Sunday scholars. Drunkenness is one of the evil associations of Gipsy life. Brandy and “fourpenny,” or “hell fire,” as it is sometimes called, are their chief drinks. A Gipsy of the name of Lee boasted to me only a day or two since that he had been drunk every night for more than a fortnight, his language being, “Oh! it is delightful to get drunk, tumble into a row, and smash their peepers. What care we for the bobbies.” They seldom if ever use tumblers. A large jug is filled with this stuff, in colour and thickness almost like treacle and water, leaving a kind of salty taste behind it as it passes out of sight; but, I am sorry to say, not out of the body, mind, or brain, leaving a trail upon which is written—more! more! more! Under its influence they either turn saints or demons as will best serve their purpose. The more drink some of the Gipsy women get the more the red coloured piety is observable in their faces, and when I have been
talking to them, or otherwise, they have said, “Amen,” “Bless the Lord,” “Oh, it is nice to be ’ligious and Christany,” as they have closed round me; and with the same breath they have begun to talk of murder, bloodshed, and revenge, and to say, “How nice it is to get a living by telling lies.” Half an ounce of tobacco and a few gentle words have a most wonderful effect upon their spirits and nerves under such circumstances. I have frequently seen drunken Gipsy women in the streets of London. Early this year I met one of my old Gipsy women friends in Garrett Lane, Wandsworth, with evidently more than she could carry, and a weakness was observable in her knees; and when she saw me she was not so far gone as not to know who I was. She tried to make a curtsy, and in doing so very nearly lost her balance, and it took her some ten yards to recover her perpendicular. With a little struggling, stuttering, and stumbling, she got right, and pursued her way to the tent.