His wife answered by putting two fingers into her mouth, meaning, that she had consumed the little fowl. Thereupon Tinker Ned picked up a loose tent rod and gave her a good thrashing.
Close by sat Nettie’s daughter-in-law, Isabel, and her children, bonny bairns, tumbled happily on the grass. As I looked at these Gypsies, all of them pictures of blooming health—clear-eyed, clean-limbed, bare-headed in sun and breeze—I reflected not without sadness on the fact that the tendency of modern legislation is to curtail and render more difficult the free, roving life of these children of Nature.
It was now late in the afternoon, and over tea we talked of other times and old Gypsy ways. Nettie told of her own mischievous tricks when she was a child, how she used to hide her mammy’s pipe in a tuft of grass near the tent, and then watch her hunt up and down for it; her sister Linda and she would have a good laugh to themselves over the trick, and then what tales their old mother would tell them by the fire o’ nights. One of these stories related to a horse belonging to some Irish Gypsies, the O’Neils.
He was an aged animal and a favourite of the family. One day he fell down and broke his back. Quite still he lay, and, taking him for dead, they removed his skin, but in the morning he came and kicked at the vâdo. He was a sight awful to behold. Now it happened that near at hand lay a pile of sheepskins, so they hurriedly clapped some of these on the poor horse and bound them round and round with willow withies. In a little while the animal recovered, and the O’Neils used to clip a crop of wool off him every year. And since the willow sticks took root and grew, the Gypsies were able to cut materials sufficient to make many baskets.
Folk-stories of this character are classified by lorists as “lying tales,” and in a subsequent chapter I shall give a sheaf of such stories familiar to all our Boswells and Herons, wherever you may light upon them.
It was Nettie’s daughter-in-law who, after listening to a ghost tale from me, protested—
“Mulos (ghosts)—I’ll tell you what I thinks about ’em. Folks who die and go to the good place won’t never want to leave it, and as for people what go to the bad place, I reckons they’ll have to stop there. ’Tain’t likely they’ll ever have a chance to come back.”
Looking up the footpath leading to the camp, I saw Isabel’s little boy dragging a dead bough behind him. Said Josh, waving his stump of an arm towards the approaching child—
“The worst thing we Gypsies does nowadays is to pick up a dead stick or two for the fire, and if we goes into a wesh (wood) for a little shushi (rabbit) for the pot, well, I reckon there’s plenty left for them as has a deal too many. If we sets a snare, it ain’t so cruel as the keeper’s teethy traps, and the lord and lady as employs the keeper talks in the Town Hall agen cruelty to animals—so I hear. Oh dear, it makes me larf!”
As I turned to take a farewell look at the group, I saw the Gypsies stretched at full length, puffing their pipes, while away beyond them lay the deep blue sea, and the rugged coast trending north and south in exquisite bays. It was a sight to cherish in the memory.