Returning to the town, I looked into the “New Inn” yard and found a number of Gypsies stopping there. The women and girls had donned their smartest fair-going raiment. As I viewed these wanderers, it was not easy to realize that they were the lingering remnants of the once powerful tribes of Browns and Winters hailing from the Border country in the days of Sheriff Walter Scott.
Passing through the archway of the inn, I mingle again with the crowd, but no thimblengro, no Irish Murtagh, no Jack Dale meet the eye, though, curiously enough, from the racing stables at Baumber, where the Derby winner of 1875—Prince Batthyany’s Galopin—was born, there are two or three jockeys looking more than usually diminutive among the burly dealers in the street.
Towards the end of the afternoon the fair began to slacken. The few remaining groups of horses seemed to have gone to sleep in the sultry Bull Ring. Already farmers were moving off in their light traps, and dealers were making for the railway station. Going along the riverside path I saw a Gypsy man asleep at the foot of a tree, and, climbing a fence, I found myself in the encampment behind the church. The scene was enlivening. Seated around their fires most of the Gypsies were making ready for the evening meal. Near a little tent the aged Mrs. Petulengro, a veritable “Mother in Egypt,” was lighting her pipe. Her grand-daughter coming out of the tent offers her a stool to sit upon, but the old lady scorns the idea. “I should tumble off a thing like that. I’m better down here,” pointing to a sack spread by the fire beside which two kettles are hissing.
In various parts of the field the Petulengros are gathered together. Here are tall Alfy and Hook-nosed Suki, “Rabbitskin” Bob, and “Ratcatcher” Charley. During supper, I had to listen to a disquisition on lying from Suki. Put into a nutshell, her ideas amount to this: Lying is of two kinds. There is lying for a living, else how could any sort of business be carried on. But business deceptions are not to be mentioned in the same breath with nasty lies which are meant to “hurt a body.”
“Do you remember, rashai, that time we met you by Newark, when Elijah was with us? A jolly old fellow he were. He often got into staruben (prison) for fighting but never for stealing. He would go through an orchard, like that one there” (pointing to some apple-trees close by), “but do you think he’d ever pick up an apple? Not he, he’d never steal nothink, wouldn’t Elijah. He could stand hard knocks, and would only fight a better man than hisself. He was that tough, nothing ever hurt him. He would lay asleep under a wagon with never a shirt on him and take no harm.”
Elijah was one of three brothers—tall, powerful fellows. Sometimes the trio, Elijah, Master, and Swallow, would enter a lonely tavern, and having ordered ale would depart without paying for it. When the publican protested, the Gypsies displayed their brawny arms and huge fists before his face. One day they had performed this favourite trick several times, and were paying an evening call at a village inn, where they sat a long time. Waxing quarrelsome, the brothers first brawled among themselves, and afterwards got at cross-purposes with a farmer in the tap-room. In the course of a tussle with this person, Swallow fell upon him as he lay on the floor, and, as they struggled there, a steel rush-threading needle of large size, used in mending chair bottoms, dropped from the Gypsy’s pocket. Seizing this, Elijah pricked the farmer in the ribs, and then flung the needle at the feet of Swallow, who picked it up. The farmer’s cries attracted the attention of a village constable who was going by.
“Eh, what’s the matter here?” said the constable, stepping into the tap-room.
“These Gypsies are trying to murder me,” said the farmer. “One of ’em’s stuck me with a long knife as he’s got about him.”
The pockets of the Gypsies were searched, and the steel needle was found upon Swallow. As the constable held it up between his fingers, the farmer cried—“That’s it. That’s what he tried to kill me with.”
The three brothers were arrested and underwent their trial, with the result that Elijah and Master were sent to prison for a year, but poor Swallow, although innocent of the charge made against him, was transported for fourteen years.