“Any eggs in?” I asked.
“Yes; three.”
“Did you take them?”
“No, I left ’em—till there was more.”
Then I told him fairy tales of green woods, ghosts, and goblins, and he became excited, springing once or twice from his chair, as if he would like to have danced about the room.
“Oh, I knows a lot about mulos” (ghosts), said the little Gypsy. “There’s different sorts—milk-white ’uns and coal-black ’uns. When we’re abed at nights, they come screaming round our wagon and flapping at the windows. My daddy gets his gun and shoots, then we hears ’em no more for a bit. But they are soon back agen, and I’m that frit when I hears ’em, I can’t sleep. When mammy’s going out with her basket of a morning, and daddy’s gone somewhere to see about a hoss, I daren’t go far into the big wood agen our stopping-place, ’cos of the black pig what lives there. Daddy has seen it, and nobody can’t kill it, for you can bang a stick right through it without hurting it. Mammy allus says, ‘Don’t you never go into that wood, else the black pig’ll get you.’”
We showed him picture books, and, pointing to an ass and a foal, he said, “My daddy’s got a little donkey just like that, three months old, and when it’s bigger I shall ride on it, like that man’s doing in the pictur’.”
We rambled in the Rectory garden, and he quickly found a hedgehog in its nest. All the senses of this little fellow were extremely alert.
In the early evening his mother returned for him, and their meeting was a pretty sight. Placing her hawking-basket on the ground, she picked up her laddie in her arms and kissed him. Slowly the pair walked away, casting more than one backward glance at the house.
A few days later, news reached me of a Gypsy arrival in a green lane about a mile from my Rectory. I therefore hastened across the fields, and, long before sighting the party, whiffs of wood-smoke, which the breeze brought my way, told that they were already encamped. On reaching the spot, Farmer W—’s best bullock pasture, I spied Jonathan’s cart along with other vehicles drawn up with their backs towards a high hedge. There were fires on the grass, and from family groups merry voices rang out on the air. In the lane a troop of children were hovering around a little black donkey, a pretty young foal, which allowed them to fondle it to their hearts’ content. What a picture it was which greeted me—tree-boles, tilt-carts, and hedgerows lit up by the fading sunlight, and the blue smoke of the fires wafted about the undulating field dipping down to the river. Quickly I dropped into a corner by one of the fires, and the mirth was just at its height when up rode Farmer W— on his chestnut cob.