I now turned from this scene of human depravity to the Forest Hotel to recruit my inner man; this, after half an hour waiting, was accomplished in a gipsy fashion, and with much scrambling. While entering a few notes in my book, a gentleman, apparently of position and education, wheeled up on his tricycle opposite to my window. He had not long dismounted, lighted his pipe, and sauntered about for a rest, before a gipsy woman wanted to make friends with him, I suppose to tell his fortune. Fortunately he was proof against her “witching eyes,” forced smiles, and “My dear good gentleman,” and turned away from her in disgust. She did not understand rebuffs and scowling looks, and went away with her forced smile of gipsydom hanging upon her lips and in her eyes among the crowd to try her “practised” hand upon some one else not quite so wide-awake as this gentleman upon the tricycle.
A lively change was soon manifest. Dancing among a pother of dust was to be seen in earnest opposite the hotel windows, by a most motley crowd. Fat and thin, tall and lean, young and old, pretty and plain, lovely and ugly, danced round and round till they presented themselves, through sweat and dust, fit subjects for a Turkish bath. The old and fat panted, the young laughed, the giddy screamed, and the thin jumped about as nimble as kittens, and on they whirled towards eternity and the shades of long night.
I now retraced my steps along the Royal Road to the “Robin Hood,” and while doing so I tried to gather, from various sources, the probable number of gipsies, young and old, in Epping Forest on Easter Monday. Sometimes I counted, at other times I asked the royal verderers, gipsies, show people, and others; and, putting all things together, I may safely say that there were thirty gipsy women who were telling fortunes, four hundred gipsy children, and two hundred men and women, not half a dozen of whom could tell A from B. Most of the children were begging, and some few were at the “cocoa-nuts.” Some idea of the gipsy population in and around London may be formed from this estimate, when it is taken into account that holiday festivals were being held on the outskirts of London at the same time, and in all directions. Upon Wanstead Flats, Cherry Island, Barking Road, Canning Town, Hackney Flats, Hackney Marshes, Battersea, Wandsworth, Chelsea, Wardley Street, Notting Hill, and many other places, there must be fully 8000 gipsy children, nearly the whole of whom are illegitimate, growing up as ignorant as heathens, without any prospect of improvement or a lessening of numbers.
I had now arrived again at the High Beech and the “Robin Hood,” and found myself jostled, crushed, and crammed by a tremendous crowd of people. Publicans, fops, sharps, and flats, mounted upon all manner of steeds, varying in style and breed from “Bend Or” to the poor broken-kneed pony owned by a gipsy, were coming cantering, galloping, and trotting to the scene. “What is all this about?” I said to “Jack Poshcard,” my old friend the gipsy, who stood at my elbow. “Don’t you know, governor?” said he. “We are going to have a deer turned out directly, and these are the huntsmen, and pretty huntsmen they are, for I could run faster myself.” While the preparations were going on my friend Jack said to me, “Governor, if you will come up again some Sunday I will see that you have a fine hare to take back with you.” While we were talking a hare showed its white tail among the bushes on the side of the hill, and I fancied I heard Jack smacking his lips at this treat in store for him.
There was a tremendous move forward taking place. The deer was turned out, and these London quasi-huntsmen were after it as fast as their steeds could carry them, dressed in fashions, colours, and shapes, varying from that of a gipsy to a dandy cockney, holloaing and bellowing like a lot of madcaps from Bedlam and Broadmoor, after a creature they could neither catch, kill, cook, nor eat.
While the din and hubbub were echoing away among the lovely hills and valleys of the forest, I wended my way to the station and to Victoria Park in company, part of the way, with some policemen jostling some youths off to the police station for disgraceful assaults upon young girls.
I strolled in Victoria Park, in company with a friend, the Rev. R. Spears, but no discord nor discordant noises were to be seen or heard.
The Sunday-school children had been enjoying themselves to their heart’s content. The grass, in many places, was literally covered with sandwich papers; and here and there a group of Sunday-school teachers were resting after their hard day’s work to please and amuse the “little folks” in their friskings and gambols in the fresh air. All this brings to my mind most vividly the long term of years when I had had the charge of such interesting gatherings, with their enchanting singing, sweet voices, pleasant faces, and delightful chatter as the little ones danced and bounded to and fro around me with mesmeric influence too powerful to withstand; and at times I have felt an irresistible impulse prompting me to shout out, “God bless the children!”
I had now arrived at the park-keeper’s gate on my way home. The fogs were rising, the shades of evening were gathering around us, silence and solitude were stealing over the scene, and behind me were four young men singing, feelingly, as they followed me out of the park, in the old evening song tune—
“Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day,
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see,
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.”