With a deep, deep-drawn sigh she bade me good-night several times over, and the curtain dropped.
I now came upon a man and woman sitting at a weighing machine. (I might state that I was weighed at two different weighing machines in the fair. Nabob Brown’s machine put me down at eleven stone ten pounds, and F—’s machine showed that I weighed twelve stone and eleven pounds.) Both looked above the ordinary kind of gipsies. The clean, good-looking woman was nursing a baby, and trying the weight of “ladies and gentlemen,” and the man was “ringing” his cheap fashionable sticks off to those who would try “three throws a penny.”
This couple, I soon found out, were Primitive Methodist “backsliders.” Their names were F— although they were known among the travellers as W—. His father was one of the oldest local preachers in the Brinklow district. He had worked hard in the cause of the Great Master, and had succeeded in raising a “Band of Hope,” two hundred members strong, in one of the London districts; but in the fulness of his heart, and in what turned out to be an evil moment for him, he admitted another “brother” as a co-secretary, who, instead of helping my friend the gipsy in the good work, supplanted him, and “collared” the tea-cake, at which the committee winked. This worked up the tender feelings of my gipsy friend to such a pitch that he withdrew from the society he had raised, and took the downhill turning, and in this course both he and his wife are, at the time of writing this, gipsying the country. Richard Crashaw says—
“These are the knotty riddles
Whose dark doubts
Entangle his lost thoughts
Fast getting out.”
I asked my friend F— a few questions about the gipsies he had been mixed up with. Among other questions was the following. “Now, Mr. F—, how many gipsies and travellers have you known, during your travels, to attend a place of worship on Sundays?” “Well, sir,” said Mr. F—, “you ask me a straightforward question and I will give you a straightforward answer. I do not remember ever having seen one.” I said, “This state of things is truly awful.” “Yes,” he said; “it is no more awful than true. I’m getting tired of it, and I think I shall settle down this next winter.”
A long conversation with them both brought out tears, downcast looks, and sighs, which contrasted somewhat strangely with the yelling “fools,” “clowns,” and simpletons in the fair. I gave them and their children some books, pictures, &c., and they in return gave me a walking stick as a “keepsake,” which I shall preserve; and after shaking hands several times over, I toddled off into the fair, to wander among the vans with my “keepsake” stick in my hand, gently tapping the gipsy children as they turned up their smiling faces.
It was now about eleven o’clock, the buzz and din of fools, wise men and simple, was getting gradually less. The echo was getting fainter and fainter. The crowd was thinning. Policemen seemed to be numerous; the gipsies dogs were sneaking from under the vans, and prowling after bones and thrown-out trifles. The swearing of drunken gipsies was heard more distinctly than ever. The gipsy women—some of whom had “had a little too much”—were loud in their oaths and hard words. In many instances blows threatened to be the outcome. Children were screaming, and big sons and daughters were quarrelling.
Half-past eleven arrived, and the inmates of the two hundred and twenty vans and shows, numbering about a thousand men, women, and children, were bedding themselves down in their, in many instances, wretched abodes. As I wandered among them at midnight hour I felt a cold chill of horror creeping over me, and nightly dewdrops of sorrow forcing their way down my face. To witness the sight I saw was enough to cause the blood to freeze in any man’s veins. One of the most hellish sights upon earth is a dirty, drunken, swearing woman putting her children to bed upon rags undressed and unwashed, and with a flickering candle dying in the socket. Fathers and mothers, sons and daughters all lying mixed together, numbering on an average four, six, eight, ten, and twelve men, women, and children, of all ages and sizes, in the space of a covered waggon, is what ought never to be allowed in any civilized country, much less Christian England, which spends millions in trying to convert the Indian, civilize the savage, transform the Chinaman, Christianize the African, and in preparing the world for the millennium which is to follow the redeeming efforts of Christ’s followers. Oh! haste happy day, when John’s vision shall dawn upon us with all its never-ending transcendent splendour, tenderness, and heavenly reality. [161]
“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away.”
Not half a dozen of this thousand human beings would be offering up an evening prayer other than that of hell. The backsliding woman from Northampton and her son had crept for the night under their stall. Of course she had said her prayers, as she had told me, according to her wont, by the side of their stall, or may be after she had drawn their tent covering round them for the night; at any rate I left them to have one other peep at my friends the gipsies F— before wending my way to my lodgings. On arriving at the van I saw a flickering light in the windows. The top window was nearly shut. The woman had had a little too much, but not sufficient to drive her wild or out of her senses. The husband had been “cross” with her. They had finished their midnight meal. The poor little children were almost “dead sleepy,” and for a minute or two all was quiet, and then I heard the backsliding mother teaching the poor sleepy children as they knelt down in the van to repeat,