I asked him where he was residing in that street.
“At the Model, to be sure, and if you ax for Long Ambrose, you’ll find they all know me.”
I further inquired of him as to the Gypsy inhabitants of that quarter, and he gave me a list of the “travellers” who had settled there. These I called upon leisurely during a holiday extending over three weeks. One day I would look up one or two of them, and a few days later I renewed my visitation by dropping in upon several others, and so on until this little gold-mine was exhausted.
From the sea-front it was a change scarcely Aladdin-like to find oneself in smoky William Street, a byway shut in by dingy walls, which in the deepening dusk took on an air of mystery. A little way down the street, I knocked at the door of Inji Morrison, but as there was no response I lifted the latch, and, putting my head inside the room, I spake aloud, “Putsh man te av adrê” (Ask me to come inside). A sound of shuffling feet was heard, with tripping steps in the rear, and an old crone tottered forward, along with her granddaughter, dark-eyed and twenty-five. Following them into the kitchen, I saw the floor scattered with willow pegs in various stages of manufacture. The pair accorded me a genial welcome, though they scanned me curiously as if wondering what sort of Gypsy I might be. When I mentioned some black foreign Romanitshels whom I had seen, the old mother remarked—
“I shouldn’t like to dik lendi (see them); they would make me think of the Beng.”
Then, as the old lady was dull of hearing, her granddaughter (in an aside) said—
“You mustn’t mind, rai, what granny says; she’s getting old. As for the Beng, there ain’t no sich pusson, I don’t think. There’s nothing bad comes from below. There’s the springs we drink from, and the dearie little flowers we love to gather. And there’s nothing but good comes from above; the blessed sunshine and the light o’ moon and the rain that falls—why, all of ’em’s good things, ain’t they? The badness is on’y what people makes.”
Now through the open door leading to a cramped backyard came a hairy terrier, followed by a small boy with saucy eyes and long, black curls falling upon the shoulders of his ill-fitting coat. A great-grandson from a few doors lower down was this quicksilver pixy, who sat himself at our feet and cuddled the terrier near a few red embers in the grate.
“Mend the fire, my gal,” said Old Inji. And when the wood blazed and lit up the room, granny filled her pipe from shavings cut from a cake of black tobacco.
“I’ll never go to Seamer Fair no more now my man’s dead. ’Tain’t likely as I could. ’Twouldn’t be the same, would it?”