Transcribed from the 1885 T. Fisher Unwin edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

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I’VE BEEN A GIPSYING

OR
RAMBLES AMONG
OUR GIPSIES AND THEIR CHILDREN
IN THEIR TENTS AND VANS

BY
GEORGE SMITH of Coalville.

POPULAR EDITION, ILLUSTRATED.

London
T. FISHER UNWIN
26, PATERNOSTER SQUARE, E.C.
1885

All Rights Reserved.

Other Works by GEORGE SMITH of Coalville.

THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN FROM THE BRICKYARDS OF ENGLAND. Haughton & Co., Paternoster Row, London. Cloth gilt, Illustrated, 3s. 6d.

OUR CANAL POPULATION. Haughton & Co. Cloth gilt, Illustrated, 3s. 6d.

GIPSY LIFE. Haughton & Co. Cloth gilt, profusely illustrated, 5s.

CANAL ADVENTURES BY MOONLIGHT. Hodder & Stoughton. Paternoster Row, London. Cloth gilt, Illustrated, 3s. 6d.

To

THE RIGHT HON. LORD ABERDARE.
THE RIGHT HON. THE EARL OF STANHOPE.
THE RIGHT HON. THE EARL OF SHAFTSBURY.
THE RIGHT HON. THE MARQUIS OF TWEEDDALE.
THE RIGHT HON. THE EARL OF ABERDEEN.
THE RIGHT HON. THE EARL OF DERBY, K.G.
THE RIGHT HON. EARL GRANVILLE, K.G.
THE RIGHT HON. THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY, K.G.
THE RIGHT HON. THE EARL OF HARROWBY.
THE RIGHT HON. LORD CARRINGTON.
THE RIGHT HON. EARL CAIRNS.
THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P.
(First Lord of the Treasury.)
THE RIGHT HON. SIR STAFFORD NORTHCOTE, M.P.
THE RIGHT HON. SIR WILLIAM V. HARCOURT, M.P.
THE RIGHT HON. W. E. FORSTER, M.P.
THE RIGHT HON. SIR RICHARD A. CROSS, M.P.
THE RIGHT HON. SIR CHARLES W. DILKE, M.P.
THE RIGHT HON. A. J. MUNDELLA, M.P.
THE RIGHT HON. LORD JOHN MANNERS, M.P.
THE RIGHT HON. GEN. SIR H. F. PONSONBY, K.C.B.
THE RIGHT HON. LORD RICHARD GROSVENOR, M.P.
THE RIGHT HON. LORD KENSINGTON, M.P.
THE RIGHT HON. SIR M. H. BEACH, BART., M.P.
THE RIGHT HON. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN, M.P.
THE HON. LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL, M.P.
THE RIGHT HON. G. SCLATER-BOOTH, M.P.
SIR H. J. SELWIN-IBBETSON, BART., M.P.
SIR HENRY T. HOLLAND, BART., M.P.
SIR JAMES C. LAWRENCE, BART, M.P.
SIR E. A. H. LECHMERE, BART., M.P.
J. T. HIBBERT, ESQ., M.P. T. SALT, ESQ., M.P.
SAMUEL MORLEY, ESQ., M.P.
JOHN WALTER, ESQ., M.P. WILLIAM RATHBONE, ESQ., M.P.
THOMAS BURT, ESQ., M.P. ALEX. M^CARTHUR, ESQ., M.P.
COL. W. T. MAKINS, M.P.
A. PELL, ESQ., M.P. J. CORBETT, ESQ., M.P.
HENRY BROADHURST, ESQ., M.P.; AND FRANK A. BEVAN, ESQ.

My Lords and Gentlemen,—I have taken the liberty of dedicating this volume to you as being a few of the right-minded and right-hearted friends of neglected children in our midst; and also to all well-wishers of our highly favoured country, irrespective of sect, class, or party. May its voice be heard!

With the cries of the gipsy children and many prayers, I send it forth on its mission.

Very respectfully yours,
GEORGE SMITH, of Coalville.

Welton, Daventry,
Michaelmas, 1884.

“General Sir Henry F. Ponsonby has received the Queen’s commands to thank Mr. George Smith for sending the copy of his book for Her Majesty’s acceptance, which accompanied his letter.

“Privy Purse Office, Buckingham Palace,
June 20, 1883.”

“10, Downing Street, Whitehall.
May 29, 1883.

“Sir,

“I am directed by Mr. Gladstone to thank you for sending him your work entitled ‘I’ve Been a Gipsying.’

“I am Sir,
Your obedient servant,
F. Leveson Gower.

“George Smith, Esq.”

“30, St. James’s Place, S.W.
May 25, 1883.

“Dear Sir,

“Accept my best thanks for your book, which cannot fail to be most interesting, both on account of the subject and of the writer. Your good works will indeed live after you.

“I remain, faithfully yours,
Stafford H. Northcote.

“George Smith, Esq., of Coalville.”

PREFATORY NOTE.

My strong sympathy with the gipsies and their children would not allow of my following the example of daisy-bank sentimental backwood gipsy writers, whose special qualification is to flatter the gipsies with showers of misleading twaddle to keep them in ignorance; but I have preferred for my country’s welfare the path that has been rough, steep, trying, and somewhat dangerous, and open to the misconception of those little souls who look only at gipsy life through tinted or prismatic spectacles.

I have throughout tried to give both the lights and shades of a gipsy wanderer’s life, and must leave the result for God to work out as He may think well.

There may be within these pages smiles for the simple, sighs for the sad, tears for the sorrowful, joys for the joyous, ideas for the author, simple hints for the thoughtful, problems for the inquisitive, prayers for the prayerful, meditations for the Christian, plans of action for the philanthropist, and suggestions for the statesman and lawgiver.

The Brickyard, Canal, and Gipsy Children—as well as my humble self—will, as they grow up into a better state of things, ever have cause to feel thankful for the kindly help rendered to the cause by the publications of the various sections of the Christian Church, including the Church of England, the Presbyterians, the Wesleyans, Congregationalists, Baptists, Primitive Methodists, Unitarians, Methodist Free Churches, Methodist New Connexion, Roman Catholics, The Friends, Bible Christians, The Religious Tract Society, Christian Knowledge Society, Sunday School Union, Messrs. Cassell, and other Publishers, the Weekly and Daily Press throughout the country, almost without exception, together with the various editors and other writers whose name is Legion.

NOTE TO SECOND EDITION.

For the additional illustrations in this edition I owe my best thanks to Mr. W. Weblyn, the proprietor and art editor of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News; Mr. A. Watson, the literary editor; and also to the Rev. Edward Weldon, M.A., who accompanied me on one of my visits to the gipsies to take the sketches, which appeared with an encouraging and helpful notice on March 1, 1884.

I am also much indebted to the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette for his sketch and valuable help, and also to others with kind heart and ready pen, whose names would fill a volume, for assisting me to place upon the statute book the Canal Boats Act of 1884, which will, when the whole of my plans are carried out, bring education and protection to 60,000 canal and gipsy children, with but little cost or inconvenience to the van and cabin dwellers.

GEORGE SMITH, of Coalville.

Michaelmas, 1884.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

A Sunday Ramble among the Gipsies upon Pump Hill and Loughton.

Sunday, April 23, 1882, opened with a wet morning. The clouds were thick and heavy. The smoke seemed to hover, struggle and rise again as if life depended on its mounting higher than the patched and broken roofs of London houses. The rain came down drearily, dribbly, and drizzly. It hung upon my garments with saturating tendencies, and I really got wet through before I was aware of it. The roads were very uncomfortable for feet in non-watertight boots. Umbrellas were up. Single “chaps,” and others in “couples” were wending their way across Victoria Park. The school bells were chiming out in all directions “Come to school,” “It is time,” “Do not delay,” “Come to school.” In response to the bell-calls the little prattlers and toddlers were hurrying along to school. Their big sisters, with “jerks and snatches,” frequently called out, “Now, then, come along; we shall be too late; singing will be over, and if it is I’ll tell your mother.”

At Victoria Park Station the platelayers were at work, and when I inquired the cause, I was told that the Queen’s carriages were to pass over the line to Loughton at eleven o’clock “to try the metals,” and to see that the platform was back enough to allow sufficient space for the footboards of the royal carriages. In some cases there was not sufficient space, and the line had to be swung a little to enable the carriages to pass.

At Stratford I had a few minutes to wait, and a little conversation with the stationmaster soon satisfied me that he was an observing and common-sense Christian, with a kind heart and good wishes for the poor gipsy children.

I arrived at Loughton in time to join in the morning service conducted by the Wesleyans in a neat iron chapel. The service was good, plain, and homely, and as such I enjoyed it. Of course, being a stranger in “these parts,” I was eyed o’er with “wondering curiosity.” In the chapel there was a tall old man who sat and stood pensively, with his head bending low, during the services, and whom, without much hesitation, I set down as a gipsy. He did not seem to enjoy the service. On inquiry afterwards, I found that my surmise was correct, and that the tall man was a gipsy Smith, of some seventy winters, who was born under a tent upon Epping Forest, amongst the brambles, furze, and heather, with the clouds for a shelter from the sun’s fierce rays in summer, and the slender tent covering, with the dying embers of a stick fire, to keep body and soul together in the midst of the wintry blasts, drifting hail, snow, and sleet, and keen biting frosts to “nip the toes.”

After climbing the steep and rugged hill, I made my way to find out a cocoa-nut gambler, who once gave me an invitation to call upon him when I happened to pass that way. With much ado and many inquiries I found the man and his wife just preparing to go with a donkey and a heavy load of nuts to some secluded spot a few miles away, to “pick up a little money” for their “wittles.” My visit having ended in moonshine, I now began in earnest to hunt up the gipsies. A few minutes’ wandering among the bushes and by-lanes brought me upon a group of half-starved, dirty, half-naked, lost little gipsy children, who were carrying sticks to their wretched dwellings, which were nothing better than horribly stinking, sickening, muddy wigwams.

On making my way through mud and sink-gutter filth, almost over “boot-tops,” I came upon a duelling which, were I to live to the age of Methuselah, I could never forget.

Sitting upon an old three-legged chair, and with a bottom composed of old rags, cord, and broken rushes, was a bulky, dirty, greasy, idle-looking fellow, who might never have been washed in his life. I put a few questions to him about the weather and other trifling matters; but the answers I got from him were such that I could not understand. To “roker” Romany was a thing he could not do. Mumble and grumble were his scholastic attainments.

At the door stood a poor, old, worn-out pony, which they said was as “dodgy and crafty as any human being. It was a capital animal in a cart, but would not run at fairs with children on its back. Immediately you put a child upon its back it stood like a rock, and the devil could not move it.”

In the room were five children as ragged as wild goats, as filthy as pigs, and quite as ignorant. On an old “squab bed”—the only bed in the room—sat a big, fat, aged gipsy woman, on a par with the man and children. A young gipsy of about eighteen years stood at the bottom of the squab bed enjoying his Sunday dinner. In one hand he held the dirty plate, and the other had to do duty in place of a knife and fork. Of what the dinner was composed I could not imagine. It seemed to be a kind of mixture between meat, soup, fish, broth, roast and fry, thickened with bones and flavoured with snails and bread. Upon a very rickety stool sat a girl with a dirty bare bosom suckling a poor emaciated baby, whose father nobody seemed to know—and, if report be true, the less that is said about paternity the better. In this one little hole, with a boarded floor, covered with dirt and mud at least half an inch thick, one bed teeming with vermin, which I saw with my own eyes, and walls covered with greasy grime, there were a man, woman, girl, young man, and five children, huddling together on a Christian Sabbath, in Christian England, within a stone’s throw of a Christian Church and the Church of England day and Sunday school. None of them had ever been in a day or Sunday school or place of worship in their lives. They were as truly heathens as the most heathenish in the world, and as black as the blackest beings I have ever seen. The only godly ray manifest in this dark abode was that of gratitude and thankfulness. A pleasing trait is this. It was a vein embedded in their nature that only required the touch of sympathy, brotherhood, and kindness to light up the lives of these poor lost creatures living in darkness. Natural beauty I saw none inside; but the marks of sin were everywhere manifest. Just outside this miserable hive, notwithstanding the stench, the bees were buzzing about seeking in vain for honey, the butterflies were winging fruitlessly about trying to find flowers to settle upon; and across the beautiful forest valley the cuckoo was among the trees piping forth its ever beautiful, lovely, enchanting, and never-tiring “cuck-coo,” “cuck-coo,” “cuck-coo;” throstles, linnets, blackbirds, and woodpeckers were hopping about from tree to tree within a stone’s throw, sending forth heavenly strains, echoing and re-echoing in the distance among the wood foliage on this bright spring Sunday afternoon. I could almost hear with Dr. James Hamilton, in his “Pearl of Parables” (Sunday at Home, 1878), a poor gipsy girl singing with tears in her eyes—

“Some angel in the land of love
For love should pity me,
And draw me in like Noah’s dove
From wastes of misery.”

The lark echoes in the air—

“But I would seek on earth below
A space for heaven to win,
To cheer one heart bowed down by woe,
To save one soul from sin.”

I left this hut, after taking a breath of fresh air, for another gipsy dwelling round the corner, picking my way among the masses of filth as well as I could. Here another sight, not quite so sickening, but equally heartrending, presented itself. A gipsy woman was squatting upon the filthy boards, the father was sitting upon a rickety old chair without any bottom in it; i.e., there were a few cords tied across which served to hold up one or two dirty rags, and these were sunk so low that any one sitting upon the chair could feel nothing but the rims, which were not at all comfortable. Round the man and woman were six children of all ages and sizes, partially dressed in filthy rags and old shoes, which seemed to have been picked out of the ashes upon Hackney Marshes, all of which were much too large for their little feet, and were stuffed with rags. One little girl had a pair of cast-off woman’s shoes, possessing little sole and almost less “uppers.”

The gipsy father was partially blind through having been in so many gipsy combats. A kick over the eyes had not only nearly blinded him, but as B. said, “I feel at times as if my senses were nearly gone. Thank the Lord, I can see best when the sun shines clear.” On my approaching nearer to where they were sitting the man got up and kindly offered me his chair, which I accepted, notwithstanding the disagreeable surroundings. On the walls of their dwelling pieces of pictures and old newspapers were pasted. There were parts of The British Workman, Band of Hope Review, Old Jonathan, The Cottager and Artizan, Churchman’s Almanack; in fact, they seemed to have upon the greasy walls a scrap of some of the pictorial publications published by the Wesleyans, Baptists, Church of England, the Unitarians, Congregationalists, the Religious Tract Society, Cassell, Sunday School Union, Haughton and Co., Partridge and Co., Dr. Barnardo, and others. I said to the poor man, “This is a very tumbledown old place.” “Yes,” he said, “people say that it has been built nine hundred years; and I believe it has, for the man who owns it now says he cannot remember it being built.” I said, “How old do you think the man is who owns it?” He answered, “Well, I should think that he is fifty, for he has great grand-children.” Their only table consisted of an old box, upon which, in a wicker basket, there were a young jay and a blackbird which the gipsy woman was trying to rear. As the young birds opened their beaks, almost wide enough to swallow each other, the woman kept thrusting into their mouths large pieces of stinking meat of some kind, about which I did not ask any particulars. These little gipsy attractions and observations being over, I began to inquire about things concerning their present and eternal welfare. I found on inquiry that the only food this family had had to live upon during the last two days had been a threepenny loaf and half an ounce of tea. When I asked them what they did for a living they could scarcely tell me. The man said, “I go out sometimes with a basket and a few oranges in it, and I picks up a bit of a living in this way. Some of the people are pretty good to me. As a rule we begs our clothes. Occasionally I catches a rabbit or picks up a hedgehog. If I can scrape together a shilling to buy oranges I generally manages pretty well for that day. Our firing does not cost us anything, and in summer-time the young uns picks up a lot of birds’ eggs out of the forest, which are very nice for them if they are not too far hatched.” Just at this juncture a practical demonstration took place as to how they dealt with the birds’ eggs. One of the boys, I should think of about seven years, came with a nest of blackbirds’ eggs—poor little fellow he was no doubt hungry, for he had had no Sunday dinner—which he placed into his mother’s hands. The mother was not long before she began to crack them, and into the children’s mouths they went, half hatched as they were, just as she fed the young jay. I really thought that one of the youngsters would have been choked by one of the half-hatched young blackbirds. With a little crushing, cramming, and tapping on the back the poor Sunday dinnerless gipsy child escaped the sad consequences I at one time feared would be the result. To see a woman forcing food of this description down a child’s throat is a sight I never want to see again. Hunger opens a mouth that turns sickening food into dainty morsels. None of these poor gipsy children had ever lisped a godly prayer or read a word in their lives. The father said he would be glad to send the children to school if they would be received there and they could go free. The whole of these children were born in a tent upon a bit of straw among the low bushes of Epping Forest. Some in the depth of severe winter, others in the midst of drenching rains, and even when the larks were singing overhead, with “roughish nurses and midwives” as attendants.

I found that this “gipsy-man” had been a Sunday-school scholar, but somehow or other—he did not seem desirous of saying how—he got among a gang of gipsies in early life. He left his praying mother for the life of a vagabond among tramps, with a relish for hedgehogs, snails, and diseased pork. He said he liked hedgehog-pie better than any other food in the world. “Two hedgehogs will make a good pie,” he said. He also said that he was once with a tribe of gipsy tramps, and he laid a wager that he “could make them all sick of hedgehogs.” They told him he could not. The result was he set off to a place he well knew in the neighbourhood and caught twenty-one hedgehogs. These were all cooked, some in clay and others turned into soup, and all the gipsies who ate them “were made sick, excepting an old woman of the name of Smith.”

He next told me how to cook snails, which he liked very much, and wished he had a dish before him then. The snails, he said, “were boiled, and then put in salt and water, after which they were boiled again, and then were ready for eating.” Feeling desirous of changing the subject, I reverted to his Sunday-school experience, and asked if he could remember anything he once read (he could not now read a sentence) or sung. All he could remember, he said, was “In my father’s house are many mansions,” and a bit of a song—

“Here we suffer grief and pain,
Here we meet to part again;
In heaven we part no more.
Oh! that will be joyful.”

My heart bled, and I felt that I could have wept tears of sorrow as I sat in the midst of this family of our present-day gipsies. In these two tumble-down wooden dwellings there were two men and three women and twelve children growing up in the densest ignorance, barbarism, and sin.

I gave the mother and children some money wherewith to buy some food, and I left them with gratitude beaming out of their dirty faces. In going down the hill, a couple of hundred yards from this hotbed of sin, iniquity, and wretchedness, I came upon a party of about one hundred and fifty beautifully dressed and happy Sunday-school children tripping along joyfully with their teachers by their side to an afternoon service in the church close by. I could almost imagine them to be singing as I looked into their cheery faces, and nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to have sung out with them lustily—

“Merrily, merrily, onward we go.”

The five minutes’ trotting down the hill with this youthful encouraging band brought my forty years’ joyous and soul-saving episodes of Sunday-school life vividly before me, which had the soothing effect of temporarily shaking off my late hour’s experiences with the gipsies, and causing my heart to dance for joy.

A little later on I took the main road to High Beach and the “Robin Hood.” I had not got far upon the way before I was accosted by three semi-drunken, “respectable”-looking roughs, asking all sorts of insulting questions; and because I could not point them to a “California,” but rather to a “Bedlam,” I really thought that I should have to “lookout for squalls.” They began in earnest to close round me. By a little manœuvring, and the fortunate appearance of two or three gentlemen, I eluded their clutches.

The road up the hill to the “Robin Hood” was literally crowded with travellers, foolish and gay; cabs and carriages teemed with passengers of the gentle and simple sort, roughs and riffraff, went puffing and panting along. There were the thick and thin, tall and short, weak and strong, all jostling together as on Bank Holidays. I could hardly realize the fact that it was an English Sunday. In one trap, drawn by a poor bony animal scarcely able to crawl, there were fifteen men, women, and children, shouting and screaming as if it were a fair day—wild, mad, and frantic with swill to their heart’s core. The gipsies were in full swing. There were no less than fifty horses and donkeys running, galloping, trotting, and walking, with men, women, and children upon their backs. Half-tipsy girls seemed to have lost all sense of modesty and shame. The long sticks of the gipsies laid heavily upon the bones of the poor animals set the women and girls “a-screeching” and shouting, sounds which did not rise very high before they were turned into God’s curses.

I knew many of the gipsies, and, contrary to what I had expected, I did not receive one cross look. The eldest son of a gipsy, named Pether, to whom I shall refer later on, took me into his tea, gingerbeer, and pop tent; and nothing would satisfy him but that I must have some gingerbeer and cake, and while I was eating he handed me his fat baby to look at. It certainly bade fair to become a bigger man than General Tom Thumb. I touched the baby’s cheek and put a small coin in its tiny hand. I also spoke a word of genuine praise to the young gipsy mother on account of the good start she was making, and afterwards I shook hands with the gipsy pair and bade them good-bye. To Pether’s credit be it said that, although he owns horses, swings, cocoa-nuts, &c., he never employs them on Sundays. His gipsy father had told him more than once that “there is no good got by it. I have noticed it more than once, what’s got by cocoa-nuts, swings, and horses on Sunday, the devil fetches before dinner on Monday.”

Upon the forest, on God’s day of rest, there were no fewer than from five hundred to one thousand gipsy children, not a dozen of whom could read and write a sentence, or had ever been in a place of worship.

In going to my friend’s, the house-dwelling gipsy, for tea, in response to his kind invitation, that we might have a chat together, I called to see a gipsy woman of the name of B— whom I knew, as I also did her parents, who had recently come to live in the place. When I arrived at the wretched, miserable, dirty abode, I found that her gipsy husband had been sent for, and was now “doing fourteen years”—for what offence I did not attempt to find out—and that his place had been filled by another idle scamp; and, if reports be true, he has also been sent for “to do double duty,” and whose place also has been filled up in the social circle with another gipsy. This gipsy woman has entered into a fourth alliance, and, as one of the gipsies recently said, she has really been “churched” this time. I saw much, smelt a deal, but said little; and, after giving the poor child of six a trifle, I made haste to join my friends the gipsies at tea.

When I was invited, my friend Pether said: “You could not mistake the house. Over the door it reads, ‘J. Pether, the Ratcatcher and Butcher.’ If you ask any one in Loughton for ‘Scarecrow,’ ‘Poshcard,’ ‘Shovecard,’ or ‘Jack Scare,’ they will direct you to my house. I am known for miles round.” Of course I had no difficulty in finding my friend, with so many names and titles. On arriving at the door my big friend came hobbling along to open it. If my little hand had been a rough, big, cocoa-nut that he had been going to “shie” with vengeance at somebody’s head, he could not have given it a firmer grip. Fortunately he did not break any bones in it. I had not been long seated upon the bench before his “poorly” wife came downstairs. The best cups and saucers were set on a coverless table, and the cake, which was a little too rich, was placed thereon. By the side of the fireplace upon the floor was their poor crippled son of about sixteen years, who had lost the use of his arms and legs, but had retained his senses. Tea was handed out to us, and I did fairly well. I enjoyed the tea, although I felt pained and sorrowful to see a sharp youth confined at home under such sad circumstances. They did their best to make me happy and comfortable. At our table sat one of Mr. Pether’s sons, who was in the militia. He had a kindly word for almost everybody in the regiment to which he belonged, especially for the Duke of Connaught, who had a kindly word for him. The Duke asked him one day if he would like to join the Line, to which young Pether said “No.” “The Duke is a gentleman, and pleases everybody,” said Pether, the young militiaman. “Verily, this is a truth spoken by a gipsy soldier,” I said to Pether senior. “Yes, governor,” said Mr. Pether; “and the Queen is a good woman, too.” To which I replied, “There could not be a better; she is the best Queen that England ever saw.” This brought a smile upon their faces over our hot gipsy tea.

Tea was now over, and our chat began. The first thing I said to Mr. Pether was, “How is it that you have become a gipsy with so many names?” This question called forth a laugh and a groan. A laugh, because it brought to his mind so many reminiscences of bygone days; and a groan, because his gouty leg had an extra twinge from some cause or other, which caused him to pull a wry face for a minute. I could not help smiling, when with one breath he laughed out, “Ah, ah, ah, ah!” and in the next he cried out, “Oh, oh! it almost makes me sweat.” “Well, to begin at the beginning, sir, my father was a butcher and farmer, and he sent me early to London—I think before I was nine years old—to be with an uncle, who was a butcher. I was with him for a few years, but he was not very kind. He used to put me to the worst and coldest kind of work, winter or summer; and I was often put upon by his man and a young chap he had. The chap used to plague me terribly, and call me all sorts of names; and I was a lad that was tempery and peppery, and would not be put on by anybody. One day the chap begun to leather me with a cow’s tongue, which cuts like a knife, upon the bare skin. He leathered me so much that blood ran down my arms and face. This got my blood up, and while he was bending to pick up something I seized the poleaxe that stood close by and struck him when no one was near with the sharp edge of it upon his head, the same as I would a bullock, and felled him to the ground like an ox. As soon as I saw blood flowing I made sure that I had killed him, and, without waiting to pick up my clothes, I ran off as fast as my legs would carry me, without stopping till I got to Harrow-on-the-Hill. I dirted my clothes and coat and mangled them so that nobody could tell me, and I changed my name to ‘Poshcard’ for a time. I then began to wander about the lanes, and to beg, and to sleep in the barns and under stacks on the roadside. Sometimes I could pick up a job at butchers’, doing what they call ‘running guts’ for sausages and black pudding. My clothes at times were all alive. When anybody gave me an old coat or shirt, socks or boots, I never took them off till they dropped off. I have slept under ricks in the winter till the straw has been frozen to my feet. Hundreds of times I have slept between the cows for warmth, while they have lain down in the sheds and cow-houses. I used to creep in between them softly and snoozle the night away. The warmth of the cows has kept me alive hundreds of times. I have at times almost lived on carrots. When blackberries were ripe I used to eat many of them; in fact, I used to steal peas and beans, or any mortal thing that I came near. Sometimes I fell in with drovers. I have got in the winter-time under a hedge and nibbled a turnip for my Sunday dinner. I was for some time with a farmer, and used to mind his cattle, and he got to like me so much that he used to place confidence in me. He would trust me with anything. One time he sent me to sell a calf for him, but instead of returning with the money I ran away and bought a suit of clothes with it. I durst not face him again after that. For fourteen years I was wandering up and down England in this way, daily expecting to be taken up for murder.

“I then joined a gang of gipsies of the name of Lee, and with them I have lied, lived, stole, and slept, more like a dog than a human being. I used to run donkeys all day, and when the old woman came home from fortune-telling she would give me two pieces of bread and butter from somebody’s table for my dinner and tea which some of the servant girls had given to her. Among the gipsies I used to be reckoned the very devil. I have fought hundreds of times, and was never beaten in my life. The time when I was more nearly beaten than any other was with my brother-in-law, a gipsy. We fought hard and fast, up and down, for nearly an hour, and then we gave it up as both of us being as good as each other. I have had both my arms broken, legs broken, shoulder-blades broken, and kicked over my head till I have been senseless, in gipsy rows. Oh! sir, I could tell you a lot more, and I will do so sometime.”

This terrible recital of facts—of the cruelty, hardships, wrong-doing of present-day gipsy life—almost caused my hair to stand on an end whilst he related the horrors of backwood and daylight gipsyism in our midst.

I asked Mr. Pether if the gipsies were on the increase in the country so far as he knew. He answered—

“I should think they are very much. Gipsies seem to be in the lanes everywhere. I have seen as many as five hundred tents and vans in the forest before now at one time. There are not so many now, as you know; but they have spread all over the country, because the rangers would not allow the gipsies to stay upon the forest all night. Some of the gipsies have made heaps of money by fortune-telling. Lord bless you! I knew the family of gipsy Smiths, they seemed to have so much money that they did not know what to do with it. They seemed to have gold and diamond rings upon all their fingers. They took their money to America, and I have not heard what has become of them since. Some of the family are left about the forest now as poor as rats. The gipsies are a rum lot, I can assure you. I do not know a dozen gipsies to-day who can read and write, and none of them ever go, or think of going, to church or chapel.” “Have you ever been in a place of worship since you ran away from home?” “No,” said “Scare,” “except when I went with my old woman to be wed; and thank God I can show the ‘marriage lines.’ Not many of the gipsies can show their ‘marriage lines,’ I can assure you. I have not been in either church or chapel, except then, for nearly fifty years.” I said, “Did you ever pray?” “No,” said “Scare,” “but I swears thousands of times. Mother prays for me and that has to do. She’s a good old creature.”

I said, “Now Mr. Pether, from what cause did you receive the name of ‘Scare’?” “Well, to tell you the truth,” said Mr. “Scare,” “at the edge of the forest there was a little low public-house, kept by a man and his wife, which we gipsies used to visit. In course of time the man died, and the old woman used to always be crying her eyes up about the loss of her poor ‘Bill;’ at least, she seemed to be always crying about him, which I knew was not real—she did not care a rap about the old man—so I thought I would have a lark with the old girl. In the yard there were a lot of fowls, and just before the old girl went to bed—and I knew which bed she slept in—I put up the window and turned one of the fowls into the room and then pulled it gently down again, and I then stood back in the yard. Presently the old girl, I could see by the light, was making for her bedroom, which was on the ground floor. No sooner had the old girl opened the door than the fowl began ‘scare!’ ‘scare!’ ‘scare!’ ‘scare!’ and ‘flusker’ and ‘flapper’ about the room. The old lady was so frightened that she dropped the candle upon the floor and ran out in the yard calling out ‘Murder!’ ‘murder!’ ‘murder!’ Of course I dared not be seen and sneaked away. Early next morning I went to the house and called for some beer. No sooner had I entered than the old girl told me that she had seen her husband’s ghost on the bed, and it had almost frightened her wild. It had made every hair upon her head stand upright. It was her husband’s ghost, she was sure it was, she said; and nobody could make her believe it was not; and from that night the old woman would not sleep in the room again. She very soon left the public-house, and one of my friends took it. From this circumstance I have gone in the name of ‘Jack Scare.’” “Well, what have you to say about the name ‘Scarecrow,’ by which you are known?” “Scarecrow,” said Mr. Pether, “was given to me after I had fetched, in the dead of the night, a bough of the tree upon which a man had hung himself a few days before. It arose in this way. A man hung himself in a wood through some girl, and after he was cut down and buried a gipsy I knew begged or bought his clothes for a little—I could not say what the amount was, I think five shillings—and wore them. Chaff, jokes, and sneers with that gipsy for wearing the dead man’s clothes resulted in a bet being made for five shillings as to whether I dare, or dare not, visit the spot where the man was hung at midnight hour, and bring some token or proof from the place as having been there. I went and fetched a bough of the very same tree, and from that circumstance I have been called ‘scarecrow’ or ‘dare-devil.’ ‘Poshcard’ or ‘Shovecard’ was given to me because I was always a good hand at cheating with cards.” Posh among the gipsies and in Romany means “half,” and I suppose they really looked upon Pether as having half gipsy blood in his veins.

“Well, how are you getting on now?” “Well, I am getting on pretty well, thank God. I never work my horse on Sundays, and I do not cheat the same as I used to do. Some days I earn £6 or £7, and then again I shall be for days and days and not earn sixpence. I also go a rat-catching and butchering for people, and they pays me pretty well; and sometimes I fetches a hare or two. I am not particular if partridges or pheasants come in my way. If you will let me know the next time you are this way I will have a first-rate hare for you.” Of course I thanked him, but told my friend that I was not partial to hares.

“Well now, Mr. Pether, let us come back again to the time when you ran away, after felling the chap with the poleaxe. Did you kill the man?” “No,” said Pether, “I have found out since that I did not kill him, but I gave him a terrible scalp. He is dead now, poor chap. I have wished many thousands of times since that I had not struck him, though he did wrong in leathering me with a cow’s tongue.”

“How did your friends find you out at last?” “Well,” said Pether, “after I ran away from home my mother advertised for me all over the country, spending scores of pounds to no purpose. On account of my changing my clothes and name, and travelling with gipsies and tramps, and becoming as one of them, they could never find me out, till I had been away nearly eighteen years. How I was found out arose as follows. One day I was sitting in a beershop with some gipsies, when a man came in who knew me, and he seemed to look, and look and eye me over, head and foot, from top to bottom, as he never had done before. While he was looking at me, it seemed to strike me at once that I was at last found out for the murder I had always thought that I had committed. He went away for a little time out of the public-house, and as it has been told me since, he went to the telegraph office to send a telegram to my brother-in-law, who was in London, not many miles away, to come down by the next train, for they had found out who they thought to be their ‘Jack.’ He was not away very long, and I was in twenty minds to have run out of the house; but as he did not come back in a few minutes, I thought I was wrong in judging that I had been found out. Lord bless you, sir, did not I open my eyes when he came in again and brought one or two men with him, and sat down and called for some beer. My legs and knees began to knock together; I was all of a tremble, and I got up to go out of the house, but they called for some beer and would not let me leave the place. For the life of me I could not make it all out. Sometimes I imagined the new-comers were detectives in disguise. They joked and chaffed and seemed quite merry. I can assure you, sir, that I was not merry. I got up several times to try to get out of the house, and to sneak away. He ordered some dinner, and would have no ‘nay,’ but that I must join them. I tried to eat with them, but I can assure you, sir, it was not much that I could either eat or drink. Presently, after dinner, another man came into the room and sat down and called for some beer. I did not know the man. It has turned out since that the last comer was no other than my brother-in-law. It flashed across me that I was at last found out, and no mistake. I was a doomed man; and this surmise seemed to be doubly true when he took out of his pocket a newspaper and began to read an advertisement giving the description of me at the time I ran away. They now called me by my own name, and asked the landlord to allow me to have a wash, which he readily granted. When this was over and I was ready, they said, ‘Now, Jack, we shall want you to go with us.’ Of course there was nothing for it but to go. The worst was come, and I thought I must screw up courage and face it out as well as I could. On our way we called at the telegraph office, where one of the men sent something by telegraph. I did not know what. I have since heard that it was a telegram to my mother, stating that they had found her son ‘Jack,’ and they were on the way to her house with him. On the way through London to go, as I thought, to the police-station, we turned off the main street to go up a by-street. For the life of me I could not tell where this was, except that they were going to change my clothes, or put ‘steel buckles’ upon my wrists. We went into a tidy sort of a little house, which I thought was the home of one of the detectives who was with us. I was asked to sit upon the old sofa, and the men sat round the fire. For a little while all was as still as death. Presently I heard someone coming downstairs. The footstep did not sound like that of a man. In a minute there stood before me a woman between fifty and sixty years old. I thought I had seen the face somewhere, but could not tell where. The voice seemed to be a voice that I had heard somewhere, times back.

“The mystery was soon solved, the secret was soon out. As she looked into my face, she cried out, ‘Art thou my son John, who ran away from his place nearly twenty years ago, and for whom I have prayed every day since that the Lord would bring you back to me before I died?’ And then she came a little nearer, and looked into my face a little closer, and cried out, ‘Thou art my son, John; bless the dear good Lord for preserving thee all these years.’ I said, ‘Are you my mother?’ tremblingly. And she took hold of me and put her arms round me, and clasped me closely to her, and she cried and sobbed out for a minute or two, and then, with tears streaming down her face upon my shoulder, said, while trembling and almost fainting, ‘I am thy mother, my son John; let me kiss thee.’ And she kissed me, and I kissed her. I cried, and she cried; I thought we were not going to be parted again. We were in each other’s arms for a few moments, and the man who brought the newspaper to the public-house to recognize me, made himself known to me as my brother-in-law. Some of my brothers came in the evening—and an evening it was. I shall never forget our meeting while I live.” “And you could have sung from your heart, Pether, ‘Come let us be merry, for this my son was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found.’” “Yes I could. I always felt, and do so still feel, that when I am gipsying, as you sometimes see me at ‘Robin Hood,’ my mother’s prayers are heard by God. She is a good creature, and is alive and lives with my sister at Battersea. I often go to see her. She is a good creature.” Mr. Pether, while narrating his troubles, difficulties, hairbreadth escapes, broke out frequently into sobs and cries almost like a child.

I bade my friends the gipsies good-bye and, after giving the poor crippled boy something to please him, I started to go to the station, but found out that I should have an hour to wait. I therefore turned into a Wesleyan Chapel to enjoy a partial service, at the close of which the choir and the congregation, including a gipsy Smith and his wife, sung with tear-fetching expression and feeling—

“Jerusalem my happy home,
Name ever dear to me;
When shall my labours have an end,
In joy and peace with thee?”

After this impressive service time, steam and “shanks’s pony” carried and wafted me back to my friends in Victoria Park, none the worse for my Sunday ramble among the gipsies.

Rambles among the Gipsies in Epping Forest.

After being kept in bed at a friend’s house by pain and prostration for forty hours, it was pleasant to tramp upon the green, mossy sward of Nature in Victoria Park on a bright Easter Monday morning, with the sun winking and blinking in my face through the trees on my way to the station in the midst of a throng of busy holiday-seekers, dressed in their best clothes, with all the variety of colour and fashion that can only be seen on a bank-holiday. The fashions worn by the ladies ranged from the reign of Queen Anne to that of the latest fantasy under our good Queen Victoria, with plenty of room for digression and varieties according to the individual taste and vagary. Some of the ladies’ pretty faces were not without colour which makes “beautiful for ever.” There were others who might almost claim relationship to Shetland ponies, for their hair hung over their foreheads, covering their “witching eyes,” making them like two-year old colts, and as if they were ashamed to show the noble foreheads God had given them. Others were walking on stilts, evidently with much discomfort, and with both eyes shut to the injury they were inflicting upon their delicate frames and constitutions. This class of young ladies evidently thought that high heels, pretty ankles, and small feet, with plenty of giggle and bosh, were the things to “trap ’em and catch ’em.” Poor things! they are terribly mistaken on this point. The things to “trap ’em and catch ’em” are graceful action, modest reserve, soft looks, a heart full of sympathy, tenderness, goodness, and kindness. Few young men can withstand these “fireworks.” These are the things which make “beautiful for ever.”

The fashions adopted by the gentlemen were all “cuts” and “shapes.” Naughty children vulgarly call them “young dandies”—“flashy fops” whose brains and money—if they ever had any—vanish into smoke or the fumes of a beer barrel. Their garments were covered with creases, caused by the ironing process at their “uncle’s,” which certainly did not add to their appearance, or the elegance of their figures. As they yawned, laughed, shouted, and giggled upon the platform, with their mouths open—not quite as wide as Jumbo’s when apples are thrown at him—it was not surprising that flies fast disappeared.

There were others whose head and face had the appearance of having been in many a storm of the “bull and pup” fashion. They wore pantaloons tight round the knees and wide about the ankles, and coats made of a small Scotch plaid, blue and black cloth, with pockets inside and outside, capable of holding a few rabbits, hares, and partridges without any inconvenience to the wearer. At the heels of these gentry, who loitered about with sticks in their hands, skulked lurcher dogs.

Frequently I came alongside a young gentleman with an intelligent face, marked by thought, care, and study, who evidently was taking an “outing” for the good of his health. As he passed the vacant-minded part of the throng and crush, he seemed to give a kind of side glance of pity and contempt, and then passed along, keeping a sharp look-out after his pockets.

Among the crowd of pleasure-seekers there was a large sprinkling of men with premature grey locks and snowy white hair, betoking a life of hurry and worry, thought, care, and anxiety, with several children jumping and frisking round them with glee, delight, joy, and smiles at the prospect of spending a day with their fathers in the forest free from school and city life. As the lovely children were bounding along, it only required a very slight stretch of imagination to read the thoughts of the good father, and to hear him saying to the children, “I wish I was young again, I should like to have a romp with you to-day; my heart beats with joy at seeing you dance about. God bless you, my dear children; God bless you! I am so glad to see you so happy.” And then tears would trickle down the face of the early careworn father, at the thought of a coming parting, when he would have to bid them good-bye, and leave them in the hands of God and an early widowed mother, to get along as well as they could in the midst of the cold shoulders of the friends of the bygone prosperous times, who have received many favours at the hands of the early grey-bearded father, but shudder at the thought of being asked by the poor widow for a favour.

The children, with ringlets and flowing hair and bright eyes, now cling to him and hold him by the tails of his coat and his hands, and begin to sing as they speed towards the forest—

“The Lion of Judah shall break every chain
And give us the victory again and again;
Be hushed, my sad spirit, the worst that can come
But shortens the journey and hastens me home.”

And away they went out of sight among the tussocks of grass, little hills, hedges, low bushes, and heather, to gather daisies and other wild flowers, perhaps not to be seen again by me till we meet on the plains of Paradise.

Among the crowd there were a number of men, who could not be mistaken by any one who knows anything of literary work and literary men, trying to get a “breath of fresh air” and a few wrinkles off their face, and to come in contact with some one who could touch the spring of pleasure—which by this time had been nearly dried up, or frozen up by studying and anxiety—and bring a smile to the face.

I ran against one man who was evidently in deep trouble, and I began to question him as to the cause of his sorrow, and he told me as follows: “For many years I was a clerk in a solicitor’s office in the city, and on my arrival home at night, I used to write stories and other things for the papers, without pay, merely for pleasure. In course of time my eyesight failed me, and I had to give up my situation. I thought I would try to write a story for publication, so that I might maintain my family, and keep them from the workhouse. I began the tale and finished it. I made sure that I should have no difficulty in getting some publisher to take it up and print it for me, and that I should make a fortune, and be made a man; but to my surprise no one would look at it. I went from one place to another, day after day, without any success, returning home every night thoroughly broken down and dispirited, and to-day I have my manuscript without any prospect of meeting with a customer, and am strolling here to contemplate the next step.” I gave him a little encouragement, and told him to cheer up—

“Behind a frowning Providence He hides a smiling face.”

We shook hands and parted.

I had not gone far before I overtook a woman in deep mourning, with four children walking slowly along. There was no friskiness, liveliness, and sport about this family. The two least hung as it were upon the skirts of the poor sorrowful mother’s garments. Despair seemed to be written not only upon their faces, but upon their clothes and actions. The fountain of tears had been dried up, but not by the kindness of friends, but by poverty and starvation, with all their grim horrors staring them in the face, and with the terrible workhouse as the lot in store for them, till there was scarcely any vitality left in their system from which tears could be extracted either by kindness or sorrow. They seemed to be the embodiment of pallor, languidness, and lifelessness. This poor woman had had a good education; in fact, her manner and conversation seemed to be that of a lady who had moved in good society; but alas, overwork, worry, and death had early robbed her of a good husband, when he was on the threshold of a first-class position and a fortune, and all was gone! gone! and now “blank,” “blank,” “blank” seemed to be written everywhere. I tried to console her best as I could, and left her.

I had now begun to mount the hills of Epping Forest with a different phase of human life before and on either side of me. On the grass were four gipsies and “Rodneys,” with dogs lying beside them. In all appearance they had neither worked nor washed in their lives, and, as they said, they were “too old to learn how now.” I had not got much further before I was accosted by a gipsy girl, apparently about fourteen, with a baby nearly nude, and covered with dirt and filth, draining the nourishment of life from its dirty mother, who exposed her breasts without the least shame. She saw that I noticed her, and without a moment’s hesitation asked me if I wanted my “fortune told.” She said that she would tell it to me for a trifle. Her father—to all appearance—and brothers stood by, and acting either upon her own instincts or a wink from them, she said, “I see you know it better than I can tell you;” and away she sidled off to attend to her cocoa-nuts, saying, after a round of swearing at four gipsy children, “I hope you will give my baby a penny; that’s a good gentleman, do, and God will bless you for it.”

I had not gone far up the hill before I found myself in company with a forest ranger; and a rare good-looking fellow he was. He was a short thickset man, and as round almost as a prize bullock. He said the gipsies—so-called gipsies—were the plague of his life. They were squatting about everywhere, breaking the fences and stealing everything they could lay their hands upon. Before the last three years there were hundreds of gipsies in the forest, living by plunder and fortune-telling, and since they had driven them away, they had settled upon the outskirts of the forest and pieces of waste land, some of which were rented by some of the better class gipsies, and relet again to the other gipsies at a small charge per week, who thus escaped the law. This good ranger said there were no real gipsies at the present time in the country. They had been mixed up with other vagabonds that scarcely a trace of the genuine gipsy was left.

Some old gipsies were complaining very much because the price of cocoa-nuts had been raised. “Until now,” said this lot of vagabond gipsies, “we could get cocoa-nuts at one pound per hundred; now we are, to-day, giving thirty shillings per hundred; and it is no joke when you get some of those old cricketers at work among them. They bowl them off like one o’clock.” “How do you do in such a case?” I asked. “Well, sometimes we let them go on till they get a belly-full, and sometimes we cries quits, and will have no more on ’em, and tell them to go somewhere else, we are quite satisfied. You know, sir, better than I can tell you that it is no joke to have your nuts bowled off like that. I feel sometimes,” said one gipsy, with clenched fist raised almost to my face and closed teeth, “that I should like to bowl their yeds off, and no mistake. I feel savage enough to punch their een out, and I could do it in a jiffy.” He now left me and bawled out, “Now, gents, try your luck, try your luck; all bad uns returned.” There was a brisk trade, and a lot of shoeless, dirty little gipsy children were scrambling after the balls, and throwing to the winners the nuts they had won; every now and then there would be a terrible row over a nut—whether it was properly hit, or who was the rightful owner. “Bang” went a ball from a big fellow against a cocoa-nut, sending it and the juice inside flying in all directions, and the youngsters scrambling after the pieces. And then there would be another bawl out by a gipsy woman, “Bowl again, gentlemen; try your luck, try your luck; all good uns and no bad uns; bad uns returned.” I left this lot of gipsies to pursue my way to the “Robin Hood,” where there was a pell-mell gathering of all sorts of human beings numbering thousands. In elbowing my way through the crowd, a sharp, business-kind of a gipsy-woman, well dressed and not bad looking, eyed me over, and, thinking that I was “Johnny” from the country, said to a woman who was near her, “You keep back, I mean to tell this gentleman his fortune.” Three or four steps forward she took, and then stood full in front of me. “A fine day, sir,” said the gipsy woman with a twinkle in her eye and a side laugh, nudging to another gipsy woman at her elbow. “Yes, a very fine day,” I said. She now drew a little nearer, and said in not very loud tones, “Would you like to have your fortune told you, my good gentleman? I could tell you something that would please you, I am sure. There is good luck in your face. Now, my dear good gentleman, do let me tell your fortune. You will become rich and have many friends, but will have many false friends and enemies.” Just as she was beginning to spin her yarn one of the B— gipsies came up. She was dressed in a glaring red Scotch plaid dress, with red, blue, green, and yellow ribbons flying about her head and shoulders; and in her arms was a baby which was dressed in white linen and needlework. This gipsy woman was stout, dark, and with round features, her black hair was waved like I have seen the manes of horses, and her eye the opposite of heavenly. She now turned to the gipsy woman who had accosted me and said, “Mrs. Smith, you need not tell this gentleman his fortune, he knows more than we both can tell him. This is Mr. Smith of Coalville, he had tea with us at K—.” “Oh,” said the gipsy woman named Smith, “this is Mr. Smith of Coalville, is it? I’ve heard a deal about him. I’ll go, or he’ll be putting me in a book. Goodbye.” She put out her hands to shake mine, and then vanished out of my sight, and I never saw her again in the forest during the day. I suppose she fancied that I should be bringing her to book for fortune-telling. I was now left with the gipsy B— and her baby. She threw aside her shawl in order that I might look at the child, who was apparently about four months old. Poor thing! it did not know that it was the child of sin, for its parents were living in adultery, as nearly all the gipsies do. This gipsy woman was earning money for herself, and an idle man she was keeping, by exhibiting her illegitimate offspring and telling silly girls their fortunes. Think about it lightly as we may, fortune-telling is vastly on the increase all over the country, producing most deadly and soul-crushing results. Just as I was touching the poor baby’s face and putting sixpence in its hand, a gentleman connected with the Ragged School Union came up with his two children. I found as we travelled up the hill together that I was talking to Mr. Curtiss, the organizing secretary of the Union, who was in the forest for an “outing,” and could, no doubt, with Dr. Grosart say—

“I wonder not, when ’mong the fresh, glad leaves,
I hear the early spring-birds sing;
I wonder not that ’neath the sunny eaves
The swallow flits with glancing wing.”

When we reached the top of the hill, I took a sharp turn to the left, and bid him and his two interesting sons goodbye.

I had not wandered far before I came upon a group of gipsy children, ragged, dirty, and filthy in the extreme. One of them ran after me for some “coppers.” I took the opportunity of having a chat with the poor child, whose clothes seemed to be literally alive with vermin. I asked him what his name was, and his answer was, “I don’t know, I’ve got so many names; sometimes they call me Smith, sometimes Brown, and lots of other names.” “Have you ever been washed in your life?” “Not that I know on, sir.” The feet of the poor lad seemed to have festering holes in them, in which there were vermin getting fat out of the sores, and the colour of his body was that of a tortoise, except patches of a little lighter yellow were to be seen here and there. “Do you ever say your prayers?” “Yes, sir, sometimes.” “What do you say when you say your prayers? Who teaches you them?” “My sister,” said the boy. “Tell me the first line and I will give you a penny.” “I cannot, I’ve forgotten them; and so has my sister.” “Can you read?” “No.” “Were you ever in a school?” “No.” “Did you ever hear of Jesus?” “I never heard of such a man. He does not live upon this forest.” “Where does God live?” “I don’t know; I never heard of him neither. There used to be a chap live in the forest named like it, but he’s been gone away a long time. I think he went a ‘hoppin’ in Kent two or three years ago.” At this juncture a Sunday-school teacher connected with College Green Chapel, Stepney, whom I knew, came up, and we entered into conversation together. The poor lad said he had not had anything to eat “since Saturday.” My young friend gave him some sandwiches, and I gave him some “coppers,” and we separated.

An old gipsy woman appeared upon the scene with two little ragged gipsy children at her heels and a long stick in her hand, reminding me of the “shepherd’s crook.” On her feet were two odd, old, and worn-out navvy’s boots stuffed with rags, pieces of which were trailing after her heels. Her dress—if it could be called dress—was short, and almost hung in shreds; crooked and disgustingly filthy, she strutted about telling fortunes. I said to the old hypocrite, “How old are you? you must be getting a good round age.” With a quivering lip, trembling voice, and a tottering limb and stick she replied, “If it please the Lord, I shall be seventy-five soon.” “Which tribe of the gipsies do you belong to?” “I belong to the Drapers.” She now altered the tone of her voice to that of earnestness and said, “My good gentleman, I hope you have got a penny for me; I’ve had nothing to eat to-day.” Her voice began to quaver again, and, looking up towards the bright blue sky, “Now, my dear good gentleman, please do give me a penny, and the Lord will bless you. I’ve had a large family—nineteen children, and only three are dead.” I said, “What will you charge me for telling me my fortune?” She seemed a different woman in a minute, and replied in sharp tones, “You know it better than I can tell you.” The old gipsy woman fancied that she “smelt a rat,” and she turned away, with some hellish language to the little gipsies, and was lost among the crowd of holiday-makers passing backwards and forwards, drinking, swearing, gambling, fighting, racing, frolicsome, funny, and thoughtful. The curtain was now drawn, and I left her to pursue her satanic work among the simple, gay, and serious.

For a few minutes I stood in meditation and wonder, while the crowds of gipsies were pursuing their work in fortune-telling and at the swings, cocoa-nuts, donkey-riding, steam horses, &c. One young fellow I saw among the gipsies was not of gipsy birth or gipsy extraction. It was quite evident from his manner and tattered, black cloth dress, that the young man was nearly at the bottom of a slippery inclined plane. His figure brought to me a familiar scene of some twenty-five years ago, and with which I was well acquainted. The young man reminded me of the only son of a Methodist local preacher who had had the sole management of extensive earthenware works in the — for a long term of years, and was highly respected in the district. The young man had been petted and almost idolized. This only son was highly educated, and in every way was being prepared to take his father’s place at the works some day. His sisters worked carpet slippers for him, and his mother warmed them before he went to bed; and “good-nights” were given in the midst of loving embraces, prayers, and kisses. Oftentimes they were given and said while tears of thankfulness to God for having given them, as they thought, a son who was to give them comfort, solace, and pride as they toddled down the hill together, while the shades of evening gathered round them. Every one in this Christian household thought no labour in winter or summer, night or day, too much to be bestowed upon their darling son. Alas! alas! this idolized boy, for whom thousands of prayers had been offered to Heaven on his behalf, in an evil hour ceased to pray for himself, and took the wrong turning or “sharp round to the left,” and the last I heard of him was that he had fallen in with a gang of gipsies, ended his days as a vagabond in a union in Yorkshire, and had brought his parents with their early grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. His loving sisters to-day are scattered to the winds. These recollections brought tears to my eyes and a deep, deep sigh from the bottom of my heart.

I hung down my head, for I thought by the smarting of my eyes they would tell a tale, and made my way on foot in the midst of clouds of dust to Chingford, at the edge of the Forest, where Easter Monday was being held in high glee. Among the people, gentle and simple, I met on my way was a cartload of drunken lads and screaming wenches being drawn to the “Robin Hood” and High Beech by a poor, bony, grey, old, worn-out pony, with knees large enough for two horses, owing to its many falls upon the hard stones without the option of choice. If it had not been that it had a load of donkeys and little live beer barrels with their vent pegs drawn, filling the air on this bright spring morning with

“We won’t go home till morning,
We won’t go home till morning,
Till daylight doth appear,”

it might have turned round and bawled out, “Am not I thine ass?” Unfortunately for the poor dumb animal there was no one in its load that had sense, except in response to a policeman’s cudgel, to understand the meaning of “Am not I thine ass?” And away it hobbled and limped till it was out of sight. By this time perhaps the poor thing has been made into sausages, and sold to the “poor” as a rich treat for Sunday only.

One of this load of young sinners stood up in their midst—or I should say was propped up—and, with his hat slouching backward in his neck, shouted, “Mates, let’s give three cheers for Epping Forest.” “All right,” they cried out, “Hip, hip, hurrah! hip, hip, hurrah!” Another bawled out, “Let’s give three cheers for Easter Monday.” “Bravo, Jack; that’s it!” shouted a third, as he lay “all of a heap” at the bottom of the cart. “Hip, hip, hurrah! hip, hip, hurrah! hip, hip, hip—” but they could not in this trial of strength get any farther. The “hurrah” was left for another Easter Monday. By this time, owing to the fumes of the beer barrel and the jolting of the cart, they had become such a “set out as I never did see.” Out of this pell-mell cartload of sin one of the crew, who needed a “slobbing bib,” cried out, “I—I—I say, Bill, let’s give three cheers for your old cat.” “You fool, we have no old cat,” said Bill. “I didn’t say you had.” “You did.” “I didn’t.” “You did,” said Bill. “If you say so again, I’ll punch you.” “Punch away,” said Bill. “Stop till we get to the ‘Robin Hood,’ and then I’ll show you who’s master.” “Sit down, you fool,” said Bill; “you have not the heart of a chicken.”

The Royal Road and Connaught Lake were beheld and passed over, and now, after observing and star-gazing right and left, I was among the gipsies to the left of the Forest Hotel. There was no mistaking them; for some of the poor women with their babies in their arms showed the usual signs of having been in the “wars,” by exhibiting here and there a “black eye;” and without any signs of the maiden and virgin modesty, romantic, backwood gipsy writers, who have never visited gipsy wigwams, say is one of the peculiar traits of gipsy character. Here there were droves of gipsies of all shades, caste, and colour, shouting, fighting, swearing, lying, and thieving to their heart’s content, with hordes of children exhibiting themselves in most disgusting positions in the midst of the boisterous laughter of their beastly parents.

At one of the cocoa-nut stalls stood a big, fat, coarse gipsy woman with black hair, big mouth, and a bare bosom. Hanging at one of her breasts was a poor baby, as thin as a herring, and with festering sores all over its face and body. To me they seemed to be the outcome of starvation, poverty, neglect, and dirt. The woman said that “teething” was the sole cause of the sores. This poor child ought to have been nourished in bed instead of being on its way to the grave, which may be at the back of some bush in the Forest, as I am told has been the case with numbers of gipsy children before. Hundreds, and I might say thousands, of them have been born among the low bushes, furze, and heather on Epping Forest without a tithe of the care which is bestowed upon cats and puppies. If children have been and are still being ushered into the world in such an unceremonious manner, it may be taken for granted that they have been and still are ushered out of the world “when they are not wanted” in an equally unceremonious manner. Queer things come to my ears sometimes. Gipsy morality, cleanliness, faithfulness, honesty, and industry exist only in moonshine—with some noble exceptions—and in the brain of some backwood romantic gipsy novelists, who have more than once been bewitched by the guile of gipsydom detrimental to their own interests and the welfare of our country. A “witching eye” has blindfolded hundreds to the putrifying mass of gipsyism; and a gipsy’s deceitful tongue has thrown thousands of “simple-minded” off their guard, and left them to flounder, struggle, and die in the mud of sin, with a future hope worse than that of a dog.

A tall fellow, almost like two six feet laths nailed together, now came near, and began to abuse the poor woman in a most fearful manner for having been away from the cocoa-nut stall attending to the needs of her child. The swearing was most blood-curdling and horrifying. I left this establishment to witness the cruel treatment the poor donkeys were receiving at the hands of these vagabond gipsies, which is almost beyond description. The thrashing, kicking, and striking with sharp pointed sticks, to make the poor donkeys go faster with their loads of big and little children on their backs, were enough to make one’s hair stand on end.

I now turned from this scene of human depravity to the Forest Hotel to recruit my inner man; this, after half an hour waiting, was accomplished in a gipsy fashion, and with much scrambling. While entering a few notes in my book, a gentleman, apparently of position and education, wheeled up on his tricycle opposite to my window. He had not long dismounted, lighted his pipe, and sauntered about for a rest, before a gipsy woman wanted to make friends with him, I suppose to tell his fortune. Fortunately he was proof against her “witching eyes,” forced smiles, and “My dear good gentleman,” and turned away from her in disgust. She did not understand rebuffs and scowling looks, and went away with her forced smile of gipsydom hanging upon her lips and in her eyes among the crowd to try her “practised” hand upon some one else not quite so wide-awake as this gentleman upon the tricycle.

A lively change was soon manifest. Dancing among a pother of dust was to be seen in earnest opposite the hotel windows, by a most motley crowd. Fat and thin, tall and lean, young and old, pretty and plain, lovely and ugly, danced round and round till they presented themselves, through sweat and dust, fit subjects for a Turkish bath. The old and fat panted, the young laughed, the giddy screamed, and the thin jumped about as nimble as kittens, and on they whirled towards eternity and the shades of long night.

I now retraced my steps along the Royal Road to the “Robin Hood,” and while doing so I tried to gather, from various sources, the probable number of gipsies, young and old, in Epping Forest on Easter Monday. Sometimes I counted, at other times I asked the royal verderers, gipsies, show people, and others; and, putting all things together, I may safely say that there were thirty gipsy women who were telling fortunes, four hundred gipsy children, and two hundred men and women, not half a dozen of whom could tell A from B. Most of the children were begging, and some few were at the “cocoa-nuts.” Some idea of the gipsy population in and around London may be formed from this estimate, when it is taken into account that holiday festivals were being held on the outskirts of London at the same time, and in all directions. Upon Wanstead Flats, Cherry Island, Barking Road, Canning Town, Hackney Flats, Hackney Marshes, Battersea, Wandsworth, Chelsea, Wardley Street, Notting Hill, and many other places, there must be fully 8000 gipsy children, nearly the whole of whom are illegitimate, growing up as ignorant as heathens, without any prospect of improvement or a lessening of numbers.

I had now arrived again at the High Beech and the “Robin Hood,” and found myself jostled, crushed, and crammed by a tremendous crowd of people. Publicans, fops, sharps, and flats, mounted upon all manner of steeds, varying in style and breed from “Bend Or” to the poor broken-kneed pony owned by a gipsy, were coming cantering, galloping, and trotting to the scene. “What is all this about?” I said to “Jack Poshcard,” my old friend the gipsy, who stood at my elbow. “Don’t you know, governor?” said he. “We are going to have a deer turned out directly, and these are the huntsmen, and pretty huntsmen they are, for I could run faster myself.” While the preparations were going on my friend Jack said to me, “Governor, if you will come up again some Sunday I will see that you have a fine hare to take back with you.” While we were talking a hare showed its white tail among the bushes on the side of the hill, and I fancied I heard Jack smacking his lips at this treat in store for him.

There was a tremendous move forward taking place. The deer was turned out, and these London quasi-huntsmen were after it as fast as their steeds could carry them, dressed in fashions, colours, and shapes, varying from that of a gipsy to a dandy cockney, holloaing and bellowing like a lot of madcaps from Bedlam and Broadmoor, after a creature they could neither catch, kill, cook, nor eat.

While the din and hubbub were echoing away among the lovely hills and valleys of the forest, I wended my way to the station and to Victoria Park in company, part of the way, with some policemen jostling some youths off to the police station for disgraceful assaults upon young girls.

I strolled in Victoria Park, in company with a friend, the Rev. R. Spears, but no discord nor discordant noises were to be seen or heard.

The Sunday-school children had been enjoying themselves to their heart’s content. The grass, in many places, was literally covered with sandwich papers; and here and there a group of Sunday-school teachers were resting after their hard day’s work to please and amuse the “little folks” in their friskings and gambols in the fresh air. All this brings to my mind most vividly the long term of years when I had had the charge of such interesting gatherings, with their enchanting singing, sweet voices, pleasant faces, and delightful chatter as the little ones danced and bounded to and fro around me with mesmeric influence too powerful to withstand; and at times I have felt an irresistible impulse prompting me to shout out, “God bless the children!”

I had now arrived at the park-keeper’s gate on my way home. The fogs were rising, the shades of evening were gathering around us, silence and solitude were stealing over the scene, and behind me were four young men singing, feelingly, as they followed me out of the park, in the old evening song tune—

“Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day,
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see,
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.”

To which I said, Amen and Amen. “So mote it be.”

Rambles among the Gipsies upon Wanstead Flats.

Easter Tuesday was cold, disagreeable, and damp. A London fog was hanging overhead as I turned early out of my lodgings to visit Wanstead Flats gipsy fair. Between the black fog and the rays of the sun a struggle seemed to be taking place as to which influence should rule London for the day, by imparting either darkness, gloom, and melancholy, or light, brightness, and cheerfulness to the millions of dwellers and toilers in London streets, shops, offices, garrets, cellars, mansions, and palaces. The struggle did not continue long. Fog and mist had to vanish into thin air at the bidding of the Spring sun’s rays, and black particles of soot had to drop upon the pavement to be swept into the London sewers by scavengers. For my own part I felt heavy all day through fog and sunshine.

I duly arrived at Forest Gate, and began to wander among the gipsies, “taking stock,” and indulging in other preliminaries before making a practical “survey” of the whole.

During my peregrinations among the Wanstead Gonjos, Poshpeérdos, Romani-chals, and Romany Ryes, I came upon a gentleman with whom I had a long interesting conversation about the best means, plans, and modes of dealing with our little street Arabs and other juveniles who have “gone wrong,” or are found in paths leading to it. From my friend I gleaned some interesting information relating to the early steps taken to bring them back into paths of honesty, industry, and uprightness. Mary Carpenter, of Bristol, worked hard, long, and successfully in this direction. Although she has passed away, the fruits of her labour are seen at Bristol and at other places in the country to-day, and will continue green till the last trumpet shall sound, and we are called home to live in an atmosphere where there is no sorrow, crying, wretchedness, poverty, misery, or death, and where gipsy and canal children’s rags will be transformed into angel robes, and their dirt and filth into angel brightness and seraphic splendour.

About a century ago, an institution was set on foot in the Borough of Southwark called the Philanthropic Society, date 1780, which provided a home for the children of prisoners, who would otherwise have been thrown upon the world to beg or steal as best they could. For a period of more than half a century, the benevolent character of the society secured for it a fair share of voluntary support from the public. For many years it gathered together and educated both boys and girls—some of whom were gipsy children. The former were taught trades, such as tailoring, shoe-making, and rope-making. The girls were taught laundry work and the duties of domestic life. It was found, however, by much experience, sometimes painful, that the presence of both sexes, although kept as separate as possible, was not advantageous, and therefore, early in the present century, boys only were received. These were non-criminals themselves—only the offspring of that class, and destitute.

When separate prisons were found necessary for the more successful reclaiming, as it was hoped, of juvenile offenders, Parkhurst prison in the Isle of Wight was used for that class. The experiment of keeping young criminals together and away from older ones was considered so far satisfactory that, in the year 1846, Sir George Grey, as Home Secretary, resolved—no doubt at the instigation of Mary Carpenter, and as the result of her agitation in this direction—on trying the experiment of relieving the pressure arising from increased numbers by drafting those who had the most reliable characters into an institution from which they might hope to have more liberty, and ultimately, by continued good conduct, be placed out in service, and so obtain their freedom. All the inmates of Parkhurst prison were under sentence of seven or ten years’ transportation. The Home Secretary had twenty-five of those young persons selected, and a conditional pardon from the Queen was obtained for each, that they might be placed in circumstances to work their way speedily to freedom. The buildings of the Philanthropic Society in Southwark were selected for the experiment, and those juvenile criminals were introduced to their new liberty, and associated with the non-criminal boys then in the Institution. By that action the society changed its character, and henceforth it became a Reformatory School, still retaining its original name.

The experiment was both bold and wise; and to insure success an entire change of management was required. Up to that time repression and terror were too much exercised by the officials who had the care of the inmates. A much more liberal and enlightened policy was resolved upon, and education and home training were to be the substitutes. A large schoolroom was erected on the premises, which were situated immediately behind the Blind Asylum, and extended from the London Road on the east to St. George’s Road on the west, all enclosed within high walls, having a large chapel on the south-west corner, which served for both the inmates of the institution and the general public. It was of the first importance that in making this experiment properly qualified persons should be placed in command. The Rev. Sydney Turner (the favourite son of Sharon Turner, the historian) was the chaplain. The head master and house superintendent was selected from St. John’s College, Battersea, and Mr. George John Stevenson, M.A., was appointed to the responsible position. Both the chaplain and the head master shared alike the deep sense of the responsibility involved in the undertaking, as any amount of failure would have been a disaster to be deplored in many ways. So that it required a strong resolution on the part of those officials to secure success. Mr. Stevenson had to assume the position of father of the family, superintending the food, clothing, recreation, and education of the inmates. A new and experienced matron took charge of the domestic arrangements, and thus, from the very commencement of the new plans, the inmates were made to share in the comforts designed to improve their moral and social condition. All the old régime was abandoned. It had broken down completely so far as either elevating the inmates or securing public patronage were concerned. The Government paid for each of their boys a fixed sum, which supplied the finances required for working the institution, and a cheerful prospect opened out from the beginning, which was shared alike by the officers and those under their care. That some of the more daring spirits should seek to trespass on the additional liberty thus afforded them was natural; that some few should give evidence of their innate desire for wrong-doing was not surprising. The first who violated their agreement to obedience soon found that the arrangements made with the police authorities were such as effectually broke down all their schemes for hastening their liberty. Five or six of the young rascals who escaped one Sunday evening just before bedtime were speedily brought back either by the police or by the superintendent of the institution early the next day, even when scattered over the metropolis; this had a very deterring effect on such efforts in future. They did not believe in what a writer in “The Christian Life” says—

“Obscured life sets down a type of bliss,
A mind content both crown and kingdom is;”

but rather in what a writer in The Sunday at Home for 1878 says—

“Then while the shadows lingering cloked us,
Down to the ghostly shore we sped.”

Those who exercised more patience and discretion were allowed to spend a day with their relatives and to begin to familiarize themselves with the sweets of liberty; and these, after a few months’ experience, were sent out into the world to make a new start in life in such occupations as they had learned during their confinement; or those who preferred a seafaring life were placed in the merchant service. A number of gipsy children, sad to relate, have found their way into our present-day reformatories, industrial schools, and like places.

When at Bristol in 1882, inspecting along with a number of ladies and gentlemen the training ship, the superintendent pointed out to me several little gipsies who had been placed under his charge to become either “men or mice.”

The first year’s experience was of the most gratifying character. The Home Secretary, the Earl of Carlisle, the Bishop of Oxford, and other distinguished persons, visited the institution; and, desiring to become acquainted with the details of the daily experience, sought an interview with Mr. Stevenson, on whom depended mainly the results of the experiment. The effect of those personal investigations was shown by the too early dispatch of a much more numerous company of young transports from Parkhurst. The design was to relieve a heavy pressure felt there; but it had the effect of increasing the difficulties in the Reformatory School in Southwark. With the enlarged operations the official staff had to be increased, and the same superintendence worked out the same results on a larger scale after a little undue tension on both mind and body. The young persons reclaimed by that process found ready openings all over London, and these were frequently visited by the superintendent during the hours the inmates were at work. The education, conducted by Mr. Stevenson and an assistant, did not occupy more than two or three hours daily, so that handicraft operations might have, as it required, more time for exercise.

The first reformatory school for young criminals in the metropolis was, at the end of two years’ experience, a marked and decided success. The mental strain on the superintendent was great and continuous, the duties allowed of no respite for vacation; but as great and permanent advantages were hoped for by the Home Government, all connected with the institution worked for that result, and they had the satisfaction of seeing it. At the end of two years it was resolved to give the institution a more agricultural character, after the example of one established at Mettray, in France, whose founder visited the Philanthropic, in Southwark, during its new experience. To carry out that plan the erection of the Philanthropic Farm School at Red Hill, Reigate, was undertaken. At that time the trustees of the old endowed school on Lambeth Green required a head master, and, unsolicited on his part, Mr. Stevenson was unanimously elected to that office, visiting only occasionally the new establishment, which required officers with agricultural experience; and it was gratifying to him to know that the foundations so broadly laid were successful on a larger scale in working the permanent reformation of juvenile criminals out in the open country than they could possibly be in the crowded metropolis.

The success of this plan for dealing with juvenile criminals makes it evident that a wise statesmanlike plan of educating the gipsy children would turn them into respectable and useful members of society, instead of their growing up to make society their prey.

To come back to the gipsies upon the “Flats,” I bade my friend good-bye, and began in earnest to carry out the object of my visit.

I had not been long on the ground—marshy flats—before I saw a young man scampering off to a tumble-down show with a loaf of bread and two red herrings in his arms. He had no hat upon his head, and his hair was cut short. His face was bloated, presenting a piebald appearance of red, white, and black, with a few blotches into the bargain. His foolish colouring paint, jokes, and antics had dyed his skin, stained his conscience, and blackened his heart. His clothing consisted of part of a filthy ragged shirt and a pair of patched and ragged breeches. They looked as if the owner and the tailor were combined in one being, and that the one who stood before me. The stitches in his breeches could not have presented a stranger appearance if they had been worked and made with a cobbler’s awl and a “tackening end.” His boots in better days might have done duty in a drawing-room, but were now transformed. With a laugh and a joke I captured my new friend, and notwithstanding that he had his dinner in his arms, we entered into a long chat together.

I soon found out that he was the “old fool” of the show, with which he was connected, and was known among his fraternity as “Old Bones,” although he did not seem to be over twenty years old. His salary for being the “old fool,” young fool, a fool to himself, and a fool for everybody, was four shillings a week and his “tommy,” or “grub,” which, as he said, was “not very delicious” at all times. I asked “Old Bones” why he was nicknamed “Old Bones.” He said, “Because some of our chaps saw me riding upon an old bony horse one day, with its bones sticking up enough to cut you through, and the more I wolloped it the more it stuck fast and would not go.” When I heard this, one of the ditties I know in the days of my child slavery in the brickfield came up as green as ever—

“If I had a donkey and it would not go,
Must I wollop it? No, no, no!”

“Our chaps,” said Bones, “laughed at me. I had to dismount and let the brute take its chance; and from that day I have been named ‘Old Bones.’” “I’m not very old, am I?” he said, and began to kick about on the ground. But I would not let him go, for I wanted to learn something of his antecedents. He had been a gutta percha shoemaker, and could earn his pound or more per week, but preferred to tramp the country as an “old fool,” live on red herrings, dress in rags, and sleep on straw under the stage. Before he had quite finished his story, another man, dressed in a suit of dirty, greasy, seedy-looking, threadbare, worn-out West of England black cloth, joined us. “Old Bones,” after a good shake of the hand, vanished to his show, red herrings, and “quid of baccy,” and I was left alone with my second acquaintance. I was not long in finding out, according to his statement, that he was a “converted Jew,” and had been to the “Cape” and lost £5000 in the diamond fields, and had come home to “pull up” again, instead of which, he had gone from bad to worse, and was now tramping the country with an old showman as a “fire king,” and sleeping under the stage among old boxes, rags, and straw. His real name was —, but was passing through the world as W—. Strange to say, I knew his brother-in-law, who is a leading man in one of the large English towns.

When I asked the “fire king” how he liked his new profession, he said, “Not at all; at first it was dreadful to get into the taste of the paraffin and oil. After you have put the blazing fusees into your mouth, they leave a taste that does not mix up very well with your food. Paraffin is a good thing for the rheumatics. I never have them now.” I questioned him as to the process the mouth underwent previous to the admission of lighted fusees. “If you keep your mouth wet,” he replied, “have plenty of courage, and breathe out freely, the blazing fire will not hurt you.” My new friend had much of a suspicious cast upon his features; so much so, indeed, that in one of his tramps from Norwich to Bury St. Edmunds, in one day he was taken up three times as “one who was wanted” by the policeman, for doing work not of an angelic kind.

In a van belonging to the owner of “a show of varieties,” there were eight children, besides man, wife, and mother-in-law. The showman could read, and chatter almost like a flock of crows; but none of the children, including several little ones, who assisted him in his performances, could either read or write, except one or two who had a “little smattering.” The showman quite gloried in having beaten the Durham School Board authorities, who had summoned him for not sending his children to school, while temporarily residing in the city. He defied them to produce the Act of Parliament compelling him as a traveller to send his children to school. The school authorities had sued him under their own by-laws, and as they could not produce the Act, he came off with flying colours.

Business was slack with this showman, and he undertook to introduce me to all the “showmen and shows” in the gipsy fair. Of course, I had only time to visit a few of the best specimens. The first show, which was to be a pattern of perfection, was “boarded.” I must confess I did not much like the idea of mounting the steps, in the face of thousands of sightseers, to pass through “fools,” jesters, mountebanks, and painted women dressed in little better than “tights,” and amidst the clash of gongs and drums. I kept my back to the crowd, slouched my cap, buttoned up my coat to the throat, hung down my head, and crept in to witness one of the “Sights of London.” After I had duly arrived inside, I was introduced to my friends the leading performers, amongst whom were the smallest huntsman in the world and the youngest jockey. While we were fraternizing, a row commenced between two of the leading women connected with the show. Two travelling showmen—brothers—had married two travelling showwomen—sisters—among whom jealousy had sprung up. Tears and oaths were likely to be followed by blows sharp and strong and a scattering of beautiful locks of hair. I seemed to be in a fair way for landing into the midst of a terrible row between the two masculine sisters, whose arms and legs indicated no small amount of muscular strength, while their eyes blazed with mischief. One of the dressed showmen, an acrobat, came to me and said, that I was not to think anything of the fracas, the women had had only a little chip out, they would be sobered down in a little time. The women came round me with their tale, but I thought it the wisest plan not to interfere in the matter, and kept “mum,” for fear that I might get my bones into trouble. Happily the policeman appeared upon the scene, and before the curtain dropped, and the performing pony had finished his antics, I had with my showman friend made myself scarce. He said he was very sorry, and apologized for having introduced me to his friends under such circumstances. I could see he was chopfallen at the result, as this was a “going concern” in which all parties engaged were to be held up to me as paragons of perfection in the performing and showing business.

My showman friend, according to his own statements, had been almost everything in the “show” line, ranging from that of a tramp to an “old fool.” To my mind he was well qualified for either, or anything else in this line of business, with will strong enough to drag his eight children after him; at any rate, himself and his large family were going fast to ruin.

I now visited wax-work shows, and saw the noble heads of the great and good arranged side by side with those of notorious murderers and scamps, reminding me very much of what is to be the lot of all of us in our last resting-place. I had the opportunity of seeing the greatest horse alive, “dog monkeys,” “tight-rope dancers,” performing “kanigros,” “white bears,” “stag hunt,” “slave market,” “working model of Jumbo,” “fat women,” acrobat dancers, female jugglers, Indian sack feat, female Blondin, cannon firing, and a lifeboat to the rescue. My friend wanted his tea, and left me now to pursue my way as best I could. For a few minutes I stood and looked at the scene; under the glare of their lamps actors pulled their faces, performed their megrims, danced their dances, chuckled, winked, shouted, and rattled their copper and silver, as the simpletons stepped upon the platform to “step in and take their places before the performance commenced.” Of course all the shows in the fair were not to be classed in the black list. In some of them useful information and knowledge were to be gained. It was the debasing surroundings that had such a demoralizing effect upon the young folks.

Turning from the shows I began again to visit the vans. In one van owned by a Mr. B. there were a man, woman, and nine children, four of whom were of school age. The woman had been a Sunday-school teacher in her early days, but, alas! in an evil hour, she had listened to the voice of the charmer, and down she began to travel on the path to ruin, and she is still travelling with post haste, unless God in His goodness and mercy hath opened her eyes. She told me that she would have sent four of the children to school last winter while they were staying with their van at Brentwood, but the school authorities would not allow them without an undertaking that the children should be sent for one year. They were on Chigwell Common all last winter, and could have sent their children to school. She said they were often a month in a place, and would be glad to send the children to school if means were adopted whereby the children could go as other children go. None of them except the poor woman could tell a letter. She had been brought up in a Church of England Sunday school, and could repeat the creeds, &c. “Sometimes,” she said, “I teach the children to say their prayers; but what use is it among all those bad children and bad folks? It is like mockery to teach children to pray when all about are swearing. I often have a good cry over my Sunday dinner,” said the poor woman, “when I hear the church bells ringing. The happy days of my childhood seem to rise up before me, and my Sunday-school hours, and the sweet tunes we used to sing seem to ring in my ears.”

“Oh, come, come to school,
Your teachers join in praises
On this the happy pearl of days;
Oh, come, come away.

The Sabbath is a blessed day,
On which we meet to praise and pray,
And march the heavenly way;
Oh, come, come away.”

And, with a deep-drawn sigh, she said, “Ah! they will never come again; no, never! I should like to meet all my children in heaven; but with a life like this it cannot, and I suppose will not be.” I gave the children some little books and some coppers, and then bade her good-bye with a sad and heavy heart, which I sometimes feel when I witness such sorrowful sights. Among the crowd of sightseers were, gaudily dressed in showy colours, a number of “gipsy girls,” anxious to tell simpletons “their fortunes;” and I rather fancy a goodly number listened to their bewitching tales and lies. Dr. Donne, in “Fuller’s Worthies,” says of gipsies—

“Take me a face as full of frawde and lyes
As gipsies in your common lottereyes,
That is more false and more sophisticate
Than our saints’ reliques, or man of state;
Yet such being glosed by the sleight of arte,
Faine admiration, wininge many a hart.”

I next came upon a gipsy tent, i.e., a few sticks stuck in the ground and partly covered with rags and old sheeting. The bed in this tent was a scattering of straw upon the damp, cold ground. Here were a man, woman, and four children. The woman and children were in a most pitiable condition. None could tell a letter. One of the children lay crouched upon a little straw—and it was a cold day—in one corner of the tent. Such a pitiable object I have never seen. It was very ill; it could not speak, stand, hear, or eat; and it was terribly emaciated. If ever sin in this world had blighted humanity, before me lay a little human being upon whom sin seemed to have poured forth its direful vengeance without stint or measure. With an aching heart I deeply sympathized with the gipsy woman and little gipsy children, whose sad condition is worse than the Rev. Mark Guy Pearse’s “Rob Rat,” which could scarcely be; and I did what I could to cheer them.

I visited a number of tents, and wandered among the poor children and gipsy dogs that were squatting about in the dark upon the cold, wet ground. One fine-faced gipsy Lee and his good gipsy wife have had a family of nineteen children, all of whom were born on the roadside; most of whom are now grown up and have large families. It is fearful to contemplate the number of gipsy wanderers and hedgebottom travellers from this family who are neither doing themselves or the country any good.

There were on the “Flats” at the gipsy fair about one hundred and thirty families in tents and in vans; and of this number there would be forty families squatting about with their lurcher dogs, ready for any kind of game, big or little, black or white, bound by bars or as free as the air. As a rule a gipsy’s list of game includes, according to Asiatic notions and ideas, all the eatable live or dead stock in creation that either he or his dog can lay their hands upon or stick their teeth into.

There must have been over four hundred gipsy and other travelling children going without education, and not one could ever have been in a Sunday school.

It was about 10.30. The mouths and hearts of those who were left began to breed venomous, waspish words. At any rate, all the more steady and sensible part of the sightseers were wending their way homewards. Others were making for the beershops and public-houses, and the riff-raff were loitering about for what they could pick up. Policemen seemed to be creeping upon the ground, buttoned up to the throat, and ready for any emergency.

A few yards from where I was standing I noticed, by the aid of gas, naptha, and paraffin, a gipsyish-looking man standing, opposite one of the cottages, with his arms folded over the palings. I soon found out that he was a gipsy, but had recently taken to house-dwelling, and was now engaged in labourer’s work with bricklayers. He invited me into his comfortably furnished house, and introduced me to his tidy wife, who was not a gipsy, and two good-looking little children. I had a few minutes’ chat with them. He gave me a short account of the suffering, trials, and hardships which he endured while tramping the country, and living in tents, and under vans, and on the roadside. “In early life,” he said, “when I was quite a child, I was placed with my uncle, who is a gipsy horsedealer, to live with him and my aunt, in their van. For a time they behaved well to me, and I slept in the van at nights. From some cause or other, which I have never been able to make out, I was sent to sleep under the van with the dogs’, and to lie upon straw with but little covering. My food now was such as I could pick up—turnips, potatoes, or any mortal thing that I could lay my hands upon. In the winter time I have had to gnaw and nibble a cold turnip for my dinner like a sheep. I used to have to run about in all weathers to do the dirty work of my uncle, mind his horses, ponies, and donkeys in the lanes and fields, for which he would not give me either food, clothing, or lodgings, other than what I looked out for myself. My clothing I used to beg, and, when once put upon my back, there they stuck till they dropped off by pieces. I had a hard time of it for many years, I can tell you, and no mistake. My uncle is now a gentleman horsedealer, and keeps his carriage and his servants to wait upon him. He is well known in London. If he meets or sees me in the streets he turns his head another way, and won’t look at me, though I helped to make his fortune. Every dog has its day, and my turn may come. We gave up drink, and I go to the church and chapel when I have the chance, and I am all the better for it, thank God. I may be as well off as my cruel old uncle some day.” I shook hands with this gipsy family, and bade them God speed, and turned again into the fair and among the gipsy tents. Some of the gipsy and other travelling children were running about picking up scraps and crumbs that had fallen from the bad man’s table. Every piece of paper that had the appearance of having been folded up was eyed over with eager curiosity and wonder by the poor little urchins before they would believe that it was full of emptiness.

The women were putting the little gipsies to bed, and their evening prayers in many cases were oaths. They had never been taught to lisp the evening prayer—

“Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me,
Bless Thy little lamb to-night;
Through the darkness be Thou near me,
Keep me safe till morning light.”

They threw off their outer garments, rolled under some old, dirty, filthy rags at one end of their little tent, crouching together like so many pigs, and snoozed and snored away till morning, except when they were trampled upon or wakened by their drunken gipsy parents. It is horrible to think that not one of this number, between six and seven hundred men, women, and children—so far as I have been able to make out—ever attended a place of worship on Sundays, or offered a prayer to God at eventide. Sin! sin! wretchedness, misery, and degradation from the year’s beginning to the year’s end! Would to God that a comet from His throne, as they sit under the starlight of heaven, would flash and flash upon their mental vision till they asked themselves the question, “Whither are we bound?” Christian England!

“Up! a great work lies before you,
Duty’s standard waveth o’er you.

Stretch a hand to save the sinking
Carried down sin’s tide unthinking.”

“The pangs of hell,” as the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon says in the Christian Herald, March 31, 1880, “do not alarm them, and the joys of heaven do not entice them” to do their duty. With tears of blood I would say, Oh that the voice of Parliament and the action of the Government were seen and heard taking steps to educate the poor gipsy children, so that they may be enabled to read and repeat prayers—even if their parents have lost parental regard and affection for their own offspring.

The business of the day was now over, and it was evident that the time had arrived for “paying off old scores.” The men and women had begun to collect together in groups. Murmurings and grumblings were heard. The tumult increased, and presently from one group shouts of “Give it him, Jock” were echoing in the air, disturbing the stillness of the night. Thumps, thuds, and shrieks followed each other in rapid succession. I closed in with the bystanders. Blood began to flow from the “millers,” who looked murderously savage at each other. Thus they went on “up and down Welsh fashion” for a few minutes, till one gipsy woman cried out, “He’s broken Jock’s nose, a beast him.” The policeman came now quietly along as if his visit would have done on the morrow. One woman shouted out, “Bobby is coming, now it is all over.” To me it looked as if “Bobby” did not like the job of quelling gipsy rows; if he had to quell them it would seem that he had rather they let off some of the steam got up by revenge, spite, and beer before he tackled them.

While this gang of gipsies were separating, another row was going on near to a large public-house, to which I hastened, and arrived in time to see one of them “throw up the sponge.” There were no less than half a dozen fights in less than half an hour. It was now half-past eleven, and I began to think that it was quite time that I looked out for my night’s lodging, so I entered into council with the policeman. We visited eating-houses, coffee-houses, lodging-houses, public-houses, and shops in Forest Gate without success. The policeman advised me to walk to Stratford. This I could not do, for I began to feel rather queer and giddy; my only prospect was either to pass the night at the station, on the “Flats,” or return by the last train. No time was to be lost. I hastily took my ticket, and almost rolled and tumbled down the steps and into the train, which took me to Fenchurch Street Station, in a somewhat bewildered state as to my next move forward. For a minute or two I stood still, lost in wonder. The policeman soon appeared on the scene with his “Please move on” and gruff voice. I told him I wanted to “move on,” if he would tell me where to move to. “There are,” answered the policeman, “plenty of shops to move into in London, if that is what you mean. It depends what sort of shop you want. If you have got plenty of money, there is the ‘Three Nuns.’” And he also pointed out one or two other first-class places in Aldgate. I bade the policeman good night, and went across the street to look at the “Three Nuns,” which was being closed for the night. The outside of the place indicated to me that I should have to dip more deeply into my pocket than my financial position would allow, and I turned to look for fresh quarters in Aldgate. It was now past twelve o’clock, and all the places, except one or two, were closed. On the door of an eating-house and coffee-shop I espied a light, and thither I went. Fortunately the servants were about, and the landlady was enjoying her midnight meal. A bed was promised, and after a long chat with the landlady and some supper, I was shown into my room, the appearance of which I did not like; but it was “Hobson’s choice, that or none.” There were two locks upon the door, and I had taken the precaution to have plenty of candles and matches with me. It looked as if a broken-down gentleman had been occupying it for some time, who had suddenly decamped, leaving no traces of his whereabouts. There was but little clothing upon the bed, and the springs were broken and “humpy.” I turned into it to do the best I could till morning. The smell of the room was that of sin. The rattling about the stairs during the whole of the night was not of a nature to produce a soothing sensation. I felt with Charles Wesley, when he wrote

“God of my life, whose gracious power
Through varied deaths my soul hath led,
Or turned aside the fatal hour,
Or lifted up my sinking head.”

It would have been helpful if I could have sung out in this miserable abode, for such it was to me—

“My song shall wake with opening light,
And cheer the dark and silent night.”

I tossed about nearly all night, and at seven o’clock I turned out to get an early breakfast, and to make my way back to “Wanstead Flats” to have a last peep at my gipsy friends. I arrived about eight o’clock. Some of the show folks and show keepers must have had but little sleep, for I found them moving off the Flats for a run out to their country seats, leaving behind them the seeds of sin, sown by ignorance, fostered by an evil heart, and watered by oaths and curses.

I turned in to have another chat with my gipsy friends, who had taken to house-dwelling, and to listen to their pretty little girl singing as only children can sing

“Whither, pilgrims, are you going?”

which caused me to undergo a process of screwing up my feeling, and winking and blinking to avoid any sign of weakness becoming visible.

What a blessed future there would be for our gipsies and other vagabonds, if all their children could sing with tear-fetching pathos, “Whither, pilgrims, are you going,” in a way that would bring their parents often to their knees!

I bade them good-bye, and made my way back to London and home. I was far from well, and it was fortunate I had sent word over-night to my wife, asking her to meet me part of the way from the station, as I was coming by the last train.

The night was dark, very dark and wet, and with a giddy sensation creeping over me, I stepped out of the train and began to wend my way home, reeling about like a drunken man. I staggered and walked fairly well for more than half the distance, till I felt that I must pull up or I should tumble. For a few minutes I stood by a gate, my forehead and hands felt as cold as a lobster, with a clammy sweat upon them. I felt at my pulse, but the deadness of my fingers rendered them insensible to the throbbings of the human gauge fixed in our wrists.

Not a star in the heavens was visible to send its little twinkling cheer. If the bright brilliant guiding lamps of heaven had receded ten degrees backwards into the dark boundless space, the heavens could not have been darker. Everything was as still as death, and I did not seem to be making any headway at all. Neither sound of man nor horse could be heard. Oh! how I did wish and pray that somebody would pass by to give me a lift. I made another start, and had got as far as a heap of stones on the side of the road, when I felt that if I were to swoon, or to have a fit, or die, it would be better to be off the road. I was just going to sit upon the heap of stones, and had dropped my “Gladstone bags,” when I heard the patter of some little feet in the distance. I pricked up my ears, and shouted out as loud as I could, “Halloo, who’s there.” The answer came from my wife and little folks, “It is we.” I was steadied home between them, and found to my joy a good fire and supper awaiting me. I then thanked God for all His mercies and retired to my couch, feeling as Richard Wilton, M.A., felt when he penned the following lines for the Christian Miscellany, 1882—

“Some fruit of labour will remain,
And bending ears shall whisper low,
Not all in vain.”

Rambles among the Gipsies at Northampton Races.

In the midst of doubts and perplexities, sometimes inspired with confidence and at other times full of misgivings, and with my future course completely hidden from me as if I had been encircled by the blackest midnight darkness, with only one little bright star to be seen, I mustered up the little courage left in me; and with great difficulty and many tears of sorrow and disappointment, I started by the first train, with as light a load of troubles as possible under the circumstances, to find my way to Northampton races, to pick up such facts and information relating to the poor little gipsy tramps that Providence placed in my way, or I could collect together.

After the usual jostling, crushing, and scrambling by road and rail, smoke, oaths, betting, gambling, and swearing, I found myself seated in a tramcar in company with one gentleman only, and, strange to say, of the name of “Smith,” but not a “gipsy Smith,” nor a racing “Smith,” of whom there are a few; in fact, there are more gipsies of the name of “Smith” than there are of any other name. It may be fortunate or unfortunate for me that I cannot trace my lineage to a “gipsy Smith,” and that my birthplace was not under some hedge bottom, with the wide, wide world as a larder that never needed replenishing by hard toil. All required of the “gipsy kings” of the ditch bank, now as in days of yore—so long as the present laws are winked at, and others intended to reach them are shelved—is to “rise, kill, and eat,” for to-morrow we die, and the devil take the hindmost. My friend Mr. Smith was left in the car, and I sped my way upon the course. I had not been long in wandering about before I was joined by a respectable-looking old man, who evidently had done his share of hard work on “leather and nails,” and was on the lookout for ease and fresh air during the remainder of his pilgrimage to the one of two places in store for him. After a few minutes’ conversation about the “ities” and “isms” rampant at Northampton, and our various views upon them, we separated at the edge of the gipsy encampment, wigwams, squalor, and filth. I took the right turning—at least I have no doubt about its proving so in the long run—and he took the left turning; and to this day we have not run against each other again.

The gipsies, Push-gipsies, and Gorgios were hard at work putting up their tents and establishments, and I in the meantime walked and trotted the course in a morning’s airing fashion, coming in contact occasionally with a sceptic, infidel, and freethinker. These were turned away in my rough fashion, and my wandering racing meditations brought forth some of the following seeds of thought as I paced backwards and forwards upon the turf. At any rate they are problems, maxims, and aphorisms—such as they are—that have appeared before my vision in my gipsy rambles as I have been working out my gipsy plans, and are, I think, as worthy of a place here as the misleading gipsy lore and lies we have read and heard of. Some of these will probably die as they bud into life, others may keep green for a little time, and there may be a few that will live and cause a few wanderers to take notes of the journey:

Little, cramped, and twisted ideas of God are the outcome of froth and foam, set in motion by thwarted conceit and mortified vanity.

Vaunted scepticism is the poisonous fungus of decaying minds and rotten ideas.

Infidelity is hellish divinity gone mad.

Nihilists and Fenians are crawlers, who crawl out of rotten heaps of wrongs, which the light of day turns into devil-flies, with fiery hate in their eyes and poisonous stings in their tails.

Socialists and Communists are the rotten toads of society, whose love for the country’s welfare consists in inflating themselves till they burst, like the frog in the fable.

Infidels and sceptics are the devil’s bats, with one of their wings cropped shorter than the other.

The froth, foams, and fumes of sceptics and infidels are only a little hellish mist that temporarily dims our eyeglasses, which the sun of truth dispels with laughing smiles.

The soft tears of love are the nightly mist-drops of heaven, which the dawn of the eternity turns into the everlasting snowdrops of paradise.

Our godly prayers sent heavenward are preserved by our heavenly Father, and will, on our arrival on the shores of paradise, become the merry pealing bells of heaven which will chime through eternal ages.

In the spirit of disobedience there is an unseen power that can draw down the greatest curse of Heaven.

The spirit of love is a heavenly wand that causes everything to laugh and dance that comes under its influence.

The spirit of hate is a Satanic rod of such baneful influence that it withers and kills everything that it touches.

Our loving, trickling tears of penitence and contrition are being collected by God to form the pure, transparent streams and rivers of joy and gladness which are to run through the celestial city; and those whose lot it has been to shed many upon earth will have increased happiness in heaven from the fact that they have contributed more largely to make heaven more beautiful and lovely by adding to the refreshing streams of paradise.

The prayers of trouble of God’s children upon earth are being reset in heaven to angelic music, which, on our landing upon the heavenly shores, are to be our songs of joy and praise.

Selfish, hollow, hypocritical, sleek-tongued deceivers are the four-faced and four-headed Satanic demons of society. Their home is among the mud; they can smile in the sunshine; but their deeds are dirty and poisonous. They are difficult to catch, but more difficult to hold when caught.

Pop-gun liberality, when it is the outcome of a little, bad heart, selfishness, and pride, may be compared to bubbles rising upon putrid waters. In the distance, and with a smiling sun, the various colours present a beautiful enchanting appearance; but as you near them the blackness, fitfulness, and stench is observable, and you turn away disgusted.

A double-headed face without eyes is he who spends a lifetime in wrecking others to hoard up ill-gotten gold, which, when in the last extremity and in fear of being wrecked himself, he throws overboard to some benevolent object, trusting to God’s lovingkindness and tender mercies to turn it into a lifeboat that will bring him safe to land.

As the sun is the centre of our solar system of heavenly bodies, giving light to the eleven illuminating planets of various colours, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Georgium Sidus moving round it, so in like manner is Love the centre of the heavenly graces, giving light and beauty to the eleven Christian characteristics, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, industry, honesty, temperance, and chastity.

Every action of retaliation is a bunch of hard prickles, and it has in the centre of it a wasps’ nest, and the buzzing of the wasps can be heard and their stings felt by the bystanders; while every act of love is a collection of perfumed, fragrance-scented oils, with a cooing dove on the top as a guard.

Retaliation and revenge are a dark cave, sending forth sulphurous fumes and the groans of hell; while forgiveness and love are a lovely garden of fragrant flowers, with cooing doves and rippling water-brooks in the midst, sending forth heavenly music.

As the process of “inoculation” applied to flowers gives to us the most beautiful coloured, tinted, edged, and lovely flowers, so in like manner it is with the Spirit of Christ. When once the Spirit of Christ is brought into contact with our human nature, refined sentiment and feelings—the Christian graces—soon become manifest.

As the wind and storm shake off the fruit which has the least hold upon the tree, so in like manner it is with the members of Christian Churches and the State. Those members and citizens the most careless, loveless, and cold, who have the least hold upon the Church, God, and the State, storms and persecution readily bring to the ground.

Death-wishers, with evil hearts, in pursuit of a good man, are the parents and life-bearers of immortal fame, which will sit upon the object of their malice, hate, and spite as a crown of precious jewels; and that which they intended and still intend to be the arrow of death God has turned and is turning into a tree of life, ever budding, blossoming, and teeming with endless delicious fruits.

Hope is the magic Luna of heaven let down and swinging to and fro in earth by golden cords, which answers to the call of young or old, rich or poor, wise or simple, learned or ignorant, and transfers darkness into light, hell into heaven, and devils into saints. Under its power poverty becomes riches, tears of sorrow songs of joy, sickness health, and death life.

The last man stands the first on a backward course.

An idle man is the devil’s standard-bearer, and works harder and does more service by his example than any man in the black force.

The first man who arrives at the top of a hill is the man to live the longest, see the most, and enjoy the most happiness.

Mysterious actions, according to the intent of the author, are either the seeds of life or the seeds of death.

As fire and cooking brings out the sweetness of food to make it digestible, so in like manner the fiery trials of affliction bring out the sweetness of a Christian character, making his path through life pleasant, agreeable, and profitable.

Private prayer is the Christian’s log, which indicates the rate he travels towards heaven, and Christlike acts of benevolence are the log-book in which his speed is registered.

When a professing Christian dances about among the members of Christian Churches solely for the sake of trade and filthy lucre, it may be taken as an indication that he has stuck a broom upon his masthead, and is open for sale to the highest bidder.

Birds, bees, and wasps pick the finest and sweetest fruit, so in like manner naughty men, women, and children pick at the sweetest children of heaven whom God loves and smiles upon.

False, misleading sentiment is the devil’s tonic sol-fa, set to music to suit his hearers.

To keep out of fogs is to live on a hill, so in like manner to keep out of damping thoughts and foggy doubts about God’s ways and doings is to live high up in His favour.

As atmospheric influences round marshy spots, rushy swamps, and low meadows produce a meteoric light called “Jack-o’-Lantern,” which in the distance looks beautiful to outsiders flitting about in the dark, carried by an unseen hand, but which is dangerous to follow, so in like manner it is with scientific Christianity apart from the Gospel.

A scientific Christian held up as a light without Christ is a “Will-o’-the Wisp” Christian.

Fawners and flatterers are like dogs that have worms in their tails and wag them to strangers; they are not to be trusted.

A backslider is a tree with three parts of the top cut down, leaving sufficient above ground to serve as a warning to others, or as a post upon which to hang a gate to prevent others passing that way.

If a writer wishes to add lustre to his literary fame, he will best succeed in his purpose by turning “French polisher,” instead of becoming a literary thief.

To polish and give artistic touches to a crude cabinet, bringing out its beauty and defects, showing the knots and grain, gives credit to the artist; while to run away with the rough and unpolished jewels it contains, claiming as his own that which belongs to another, brings disgrace and ruin.

To drive successfully along the crooked and zigzag lanes of life, time and space must be taken to go round the corners. Fools can drive along a straight level, but it takes a wise man to round the down-hill corners without a spill over.

Gilt and crested harness does not improve the quality of a poor emaciated, bony, half-starved horse; so in like manner a few Oxford and Cambridge gilt touches put upon a sensual, backwood gipsy romantic tale, will not improve the condition of our gipsies and their children.

My wandering meditation being over, I now drew myself up to a gipsy “grand stand.” To all sensible, good men it appears as a horrible fall rather than the “grand stand.” Thousands of young men and women, trained by Christian, godly parents, have been brought to ruin by its rotten foundation and evil associations. It is a “stand” from which men and women can see—if they will open their eyes—the wrath of God, the roads to destruction, and the “course” to hell.

My first salutation was from three big grizzly poachers’ snaps, a kind of cross between a bloodhound, greyhound, and a bulldog, that lay at the entrance of a wigwam, in which lay a burly fellow marked with small-pox, and whose hair was close shaven off his head and from round his coarse, thick neck. This specimen of an English gipsy possessed a puggish kind of nose, a large mouth, and his clothes seemed “greasy and shiny.” The woman looked an intelligent, strong kind of woman, and well fitted, to all appearance, for a better life. Round a tin pot upon the greensward there were three other gipsy tramps, kneeling and gnawing meat off a bone like dogs, with bread by their sides. They did not growl like dogs, but they showed me their teeth and muttered, and this was quite sufficient. The occupation of this gang seemed to be that of attending to a cocoa-nut establishment, the profits of which, during the races, they had travelled from London by road in three days to secure. To me it appeared all were fish that came to their net; and if they did not come of their own accord, they would not think twice before fetching them. This gipsy wigwam was the kitchen, drawing-room, dining-room, bedroom, &c., for four men, one woman, and two big girls, not one of whom could read and write. The only little gleam of light which shone from the conversation in this dark abode was when they referred to some gipsies, who, they said, had been “putting on a pretence of religion in order to fill their pocket,” and they knew one who “saved over £800 since he had been religious.” “If I must be religious, I would be religious, and no mistake about it,” said another. At this they began to swear fearfully. I mentioned several gipsies who had given up their old habits, and, as I told them, had begun to lead better lives. “Never,” they said, with a vengeance; to which I answered, “By their fruits shall ye know them.” I then shook hands, and wended my way to the next establishment. This was an old cart covered over entirely with calico from the ridge to the ground. Connected with this van there were two men and a boy, who, it seems, are novices at the cocoa-nut profession. To me it appeared that they were tired of the hard work and tightness of town life, and were trying their fortune at gipsying and idle-mongering. On the course there would be nearly twenty cocoa-nut “saloons.” Connected with three of the vans on the course there were sixteen children and eight men and women, only one of whom could read and write. In one of the three vans there was a poor little girl of about nine summers evidently in the last stage of consumption. Her cheeks were sunken, shallow, and pale; her fingers were long and thin; her eyes glassy bright, and black hair hung in tangled masses over her shoulders. I gave the poor girl a penny as she stood at the door of the filthy van, for which, with much effort she said, “Thank you, sir,” and sat down on the floor. I said to the mother, formerly a Smith, but now a G—, “Why don’t you get the poor child attended to?” She replied as follows: “Well, sir, gipsy children have much more to put up with now than they formerly had. They cannot half stand the cold and damp we used to do. They are always catching cold. I only bought a bottle of medicine this morning for which I paid half a crown, and I cannot be expected to do more. She has been staying some time with her grandmother at Bristol, but we did not like leaving her there in case anything happened to her. If she is to die, we gipsies like our children to die in the van or tent with us, as may be. We like to see the last of them. We have hard times of it, we poor women and children have, I can assure you, sir.” The woman had now begun to do some washing in earnest, not before it was needed, and while she was scrubbing away at the rags in a tin pail, she began to tell me some of her history and that of her grandfather. She said that her mother had “had fifteen children, all born under the hedge-bottom, nearly all of whom are alive.” I asked her if any of her family could read and write, and she said, “No, excepting the poor little girl you see, and she can read and write a little, having been to a day school in Bristol for a few weeks last winter. I wish they could read and write, sir, it would be a blessed thing if they could.” She now referred to her grandfather. At this her eyes brightened up. She said, “My grandfather was a soldier in the Queen’s service”—the poor gipsy woman did not understand history so well as cooking hedgehogs in a patter of clay—“and fought in the battle when Lord Nelson was killed. And do you know, sir, after Lord Nelson was killed, he was put into a cask of rum to be preserved, while he was brought to England to be buried; and I dare say that you will not believe me—my grandfather was one of those who had charge of the body; but he got drunk on some of the rum in which Lord Nelson was pickled, and he was always fond of talking about it to his dying day.” I said, “Do you like rum.” “Yes, we poor gipsies could live upon rum and ‘’bacca.’” In the van in which the poor gipsy child and its mother lived there were a man, a baby a few weeks old, and four other children, huddling together night and day in a most demoralizing and degrading condition. While standing by the side of this tumble-down van I found that vans and tents, in which people eat, live, sleep, and die, are put to other shocking, filthy, and sickening purposes during fairs and races than habitations for human beings to dwell in. Sanitary officers, moralists, and Christians must be asleep all over the country. In going by and round one van I noticed an old woman storming away at some children with an amount of temper and earnestness that almost frightened me. Immediately I arrived at the door, and almost before I could say “Jack Robinson,” she dropped down into a position with which miners and gipsies are so familiarly accustomed, and began to tremble, shed “crocodile tears,” and tell a pitiful tale of the sorrows and troubles of her life, intermixing it with “my dear sirs,” “good mans,” “God bless yous.” Every now and then she would look up to heaven, and present a picture of the most saintly woman upon earth. When I asked her how old she was, she said she was a long way over seventy, but could not tell me exactly. She further said that she had had sixteen children, all born under the hedge-bottom, nearly all of them gipsies up and down the country, some of whom were grandmothers and grandfathers at the present time. And then she would begin another pitiful tale as follows, “If you please, my good sir, will you give me a copper, I do assure you that I have not tasted anything to eat this day, and I am almost famished with hunger.” And then with trembling emotion she said, wringing her hands, “I shall die before morning.” After my visits to the other vans, and before going home, I turned unexpectedly to have another peep at the old gipsy woman, whom I found to be a long way off dying, and in all probability I shall see her again before she passes over to the great eternity.

Among the rest, sitting upon a low stool and drinking beer, there was a big, bony, coarse Frenchman, whom I found out to be a Communist. He was ostensibly selling calico, lace, and other trifles. His eyes were fiery, mouth ugly, on account of its having been put to foul purposes, and his demeanour that of an excited Fenian maddened by revenge and murder. Round him were a number of poor ignorant folks who could neither read nor write, and as they listened to his lies and infamy about the clergy, ministers, the well-to-do tradesmen, professional gentlemen, noblemen, and royalty, they opened their eyes and mouths as if horrified at his words and actions. Among other things he said the clergy of the Church of England were in receipt of over £20,000,000 per annum out of the pockets of the poor. I questioned him as to the source from which it came, and if he could point out the items in the Budget. At this he began to get excited and said, “It came from direct and indirect taxes.” I said, “Can you give me one instance or give me particulars in any shape setting forth the direct taxes in this country collected for the benefit of the clergy to the amount you say?” Instead of replying to this question he began to stutter and stammer, and appeared before me with his fists shut, exhibiting all sorts of mountebank megrims to the terror of some of the listeners and amusement of others. In the end I calmed him down, and he asked me if I would buy a parrot of him if I saw him again in two years’ time. One of those who stood by said, “He has got parrots enough of his own without buying more.”

Connected with one of the cocoa-nut establishments, and owned by a good-hearted gipsy from London, there were the clowns, fools, hunchbacked old women, and other simpletons to catch the “foolish and the gay.” At the back of this establishment there were all sorts of painted devices, or I should rather say “daubed” devices, upon the sheets, full of satire which the fools with plenty of money could not read. One was a barber shaving his customers; another was a donkey, after he had been well fed, turning his heels towards his silly friends and kicking them in the face and sending them sprawling upon the ground with their pockets empty; and many others with the flags of “Old England” flying in all directions. I learned some time after that the owner of this establishment during the two days’ races cleared nearly twenty pounds out of fools and cocoa-nuts, giving thousands of young folks of both sexes a taste for gambling, and then clearing off to London with smiles and chuckles, and his poaching dogs at his heels, leaving his customers to say the next morning, “What fools we have been, to be sure!” If I had been at the door of their bedroom I should have bawled out, “No greater fools in existence could possibly be. When you went upon the race-course you had money if you had not any sense; this morning you have neither money nor sense, and now you are neither more nor less than a third of a shrivelled-up sausage without any seasoning in your nature, unsuitable for pickling and not worth cooking, fit for nothing but the dunghill, and food for cats and dogs.” I now took another stroll amongst the gipsies at the other end of the “course,” and came up against one who owned the “steam-flying dobby-horses;” but before I began to chat with him one of the gipsy women whispered in my ear, “It is his wife that has made him; she is very good-looking and one of the best women in the world; no one can tell why it was that she took up with the man as his second wife. He would not have been worth twopence had it not been for her. She is a rare good un, an’ no mistake. You must not tell him that I say so. She sees to all the business and he dotes over her. He is not a bad sort of a chap.” I soon began to chat with the “dobby-horse” owner, and he was not long before he began to tell me of his cleverness and what he had passed through, as follows: “You see, sir, a few years ago I had to borrow three shillings and sixpence to help me to get away from this town, now I’ve turned the tide and got at the top of the hill. These ‘shooting galleries,’ ‘dobby-horses,’ ‘flying boxes,’ vans, and waggons are my own.” Pointing with his finger to a new van, he said, “I made that myself last winter, and have done all the painting upon the ‘horses’ myself.” The steam organ, the steam whistle, the shouting, screaming, and hurrahing, and his face having been in the wars, made it difficult for me to hear him. He now spoke out louder and referred to family affairs and some of his early history. “I left Bagworth when I was a lad, owing to the cruel treatment of a stepmother, and wandered up and down the country in rags and barefooted, sleeping in barns, and houses, and piggeries, and other places I could creep into; and in course of time I fell in with the gipsies and married one. But she was a wretch; oh! she was a bad un, and I was glad when she died. I am thankful I have got a better one now. She is a good un; but I must not say anything about her, we get on well together, and she keeps me straight.” “Bang bang” and “crack crack” went the bullets out of the rifle guns close to our ears, against the metal plates, through a long sheet iron funnel of about twelve inches diameter. “Now then,” cried out a little sharp, dark-eyed, nimble woman of about thirty-five years—of course upon this point I had no means of knowing or guessing exactly; I had not examined her teeth. She might say she was only twenty-eight, a favourite age with some maids looking out for husbands—“be quick and rub out the marks upon the plate.” And away the old man trotted at his wife’s bidding, as all good husbands who are not capable of being masters should do. A “slap” and a “dash” with the old gipsy’s brush, and all the “pops” were for over obliterated. What a blessed thing it would be for themselves and future generations if all the sins committed upon the racecourse that day could have been wiped out as easily. Why not?

Upon the “course” there were, at a very rough calculation, nearly fifty families of gipsies in vans, tents, and carts, in which vans, tents, &c., there lived over a hundred and fifty children and one hundred men and women sleeping inside and huddling together with their eyes open, like rabbits at the bottom of a flour cask, when no other eye sees them but God’s. While the jockeys were riding to death upon classical horses with the devil at their heels, to a place where, as Dr. Grosart says in the Sunday at Home, “The surges of wrath crash on the shores infernal,” I mused, pondered, and then wended my way home for meditation and reflection, and, as a writer in the Churchman’s Penny Magazine says—

“We take Thy providence and word
As landmarks on our way.”

Rambles amongst the Gipsies upon the Warwick Racecourse.

Some men’s lives, it would seem, are decreed by Providence to be spent among the “extremes” of life and the associations of the world. Some are walking, talking, humming, and singing to themselves of the joys of heaven, the pleasures of the world, and the consoling influences of religion under the bright sunlight of heaven, as they, with light tread, step along to the goal where they will be surrounded with endless joy, where the tears of sorrow, bereavement, and anguish are unknown, and where the little dancing, prattling joys of earth have been transplanted into the angelic choir of heaven. There are others to be seen sitting under the shade upon some ditch bank with their elbows upon their knees, and their faces buried in their hands, enveloped in meditation and reflection with reference to the doings and dealings of Providence towards them on their journey of life, with an outlook at times that does not seem the least encouraging and hopeful, ending in mysteries and doubts as to the future, and the part they will be called upon to play in the ending drama. There are many who seem to be groping their way among the dark and heavy clouds which have been filled by God, in His wisdom, weighted with trouble and circumstances of earth and self; and while pacing among the clouds and darkness which have settled upon them almost too heavy to be borne, they imagine their lot to be the hardest in the world. Such I thought, has been my lot, as I tripped along, with bag in hand, over the green carpet, while the warbling little songsters were singing overhead, and a bright spring sun shining in my face, bringing life into, on every hand, the enchanting beauty of the orchards, hedgerows, and meadows, sending forth delicious scents, and lovely sights of the daisies, primroses, and violets, and a thousand other heavenly things, on my way to the station on a lovely spring morning to ramble among the gipsies and others upon the Warwick racecourse.

In the train, between Welton and Leamington, I met with some sporting “company’s servants.” One said, “Y. and G. were two of the greatest scamps in the world. When once the public backed a horse, they were sure to ‘scratch it.’” They discussed minutely their “bobs,” “quids,” losses, crosses, and gains. One of the sporting “company’s servants” was a guard, and he said, “I generally gets the ‘tip’ from some of the leading betting men I know, who often travel by my train to the races, and I’m never far wrong.” Another “company’s servant,” related his betting experiences. “One Sunday,” said he, “I was at Bootle church, near Liverpool, and heard the preacher mention in his sermon ‘Bend Or,’ and warned his congregation to have nothing to do with races, and I concluded that there was something in the horse, or he would not have mentioned his name in the pulpit. So on Monday morning I determined to put three ‘bob’ on ‘Bend Or,’ and the result was I had twelve ‘bob’ and a half, that was a good day’s work for me, which I should not have got if it had not been for our parson.” I said to the “company’s servant,” “Do you really think that racing is profitable for those engaged in it, taking all things into consideration?” “Well,” he said, “to tell you the truth, sir, I do not think it is. I have often seen dashing, flashing betting characters compelled to leave their boxes at the station in pawn for a railway ticket to enable them to get home.”

After leaving the train and the Avenue Station behind me, I made my way to my friends, Mr. and Mrs. John Lewis, for “labour and refreshment,” when, during my midnight tossings, nocturnal wanderings, and rambles in wonderland, the following rough and crude germs of thought prevented me getting the sweet repose which tired nature required:—

The beautiful snowdrop of heaven, and the first in God’s garden, is a pretty lively child growing up good and pure in the midst of a wretched family, surrounded by squalor, ignorance, and sin.

They are enemies, and beware of them, who, in your presence, laugh when you laugh, sing when you sing, and cry, without tears, when you cry.

A scientific Christian minister preaching science instead of the gospel, causing his flock to wander among doubts and hazy notions, is a scriptural roadman sitting upon a heap of stones philosophizing with metaphysical skill upon the fineness of the grain, beauty, and excellent qualities of a piece of granite, while the roads he is in charge of are growing over with grass, bewildering to the members of his church as to which is the right road, and leading them into a bog from which they cannot extricate themselves, and have to cry out for the helping hand to save, ere they sink and are lost.

Every glass of beer drunk in a public-house turns a black hair white.

When a man or woman draws the last sixpence out of his or her pocket in a public-house, they pull out a cork that lets tears of sorrow flow.

A publican’s cellar is the storehouse of sorrows.

A Christian minister who preaches science instead of Christianity and the Bible, is going through a dark tunnel with a dim lamp at the wrong end of his boat.

Beer and spirits make more gaps in a man’s character than righteous women can mend.

The finest pottery has to pass through three crucial stages during manufacture before it can be said to be perfect. First is the “biscuit oven,” whereby the vessels are made hard and durable. Second is the “hardening-on kiln,” or an oven with an even, moderate heat to harden or burn on the surface the various designs and colours which have been placed there by artistic hands. And the third is the “glost oven,” which brings out the transparent gloss and finish, and gives beauty to the gold, oxide, cobalt, nickel, manganese, ochre, stone, flint, bone, iron, and clay, &c. So in like manner it is with the highest type of a Christian character. First, there is the family circle with its moulding and parental influence: this may be called the “biscuit oven,” fixing on the preparation for the fights and hardships of life. Second, there is the school and educational progress, which may be compared to the “hardening-on kiln.” And third, there is the work of the Holy Spirit: this may be compared to the “glost oven,” which gives the gloss, touch, and transparency to the vessel. Each of these stages will include the progressive steps of manufacture leading up to them.

Spectacles are of no use to a man in the dark. So in like manner scientific problems cannot help a man to see his way if he is in spiritual darkness.

Acrobatic Christians are those whose spiritual backbone and moral uprightness have been damaged by contortions, megrims, twirlings, and twisting their Christian character to suit circumstances.

So long as a man keeps upright the law of gravitation has but little power over him; immediately he begins to stoop its influence is soon manifest. So in like manner it is with an upright Christian, and so long as he keeps his perpendicular position by walking erect in God’s love and favour he is all right, and the influence of hell trebled cannot bend or pull him down; immediately he stoops to listen to the voice of the charmer, and gives way to the gravitation of hell—sin—down he goes, and nothing but a miracle will bring him upright again.

A hollow, hypocritical, twirl-about Christian, with no principle to guide him, is as an empty, shallow vessel pushed out to sea without either compass, rudder, or sails.

A man who, Christ-like, stoops to pick up a fallen brother, or who guides and places a youth upon a successful path, leading to immortality, is a man among men whom God delights to honour, as Jupiter was among the heathen gods, and he will be doubly crowned. His crown upon earth will be studded with lasting pleasure, shining brighter than diamonds; but his crown in heaven will be studded and illumined with the everlasting smiles of those he has saved, surpassing in grandeur all the precious stones in creation.

When a professing Christian visits the tap-room and places of light amusement with the hope of finding safe anchorage from the storms of life, it may be taken as an indication that he is at sea without a rudder, and the temporary one manufactured in a gin-palace out of frothy conversation will not bring him safe to land.

To hold up good works without faith and prayer as a shelter from an angry God for wrong-doing, is like holding a riddle over your head as a protection from a thunderstorm.

A man indulging in a lifetime of sin and iniquity, and then praying to God and giving alms in the last hours of his existence in the hope of securing eternal life and endless joy, is like a fowl with a broken neck and wings struggling to pick up golden grain to give it life and strength to fly to roost.

Love and spite dwelling in the heart can no more make a perfect Christian than poisoned vinegar and cream can make pure honey.

Every huntsman who jumps a fence makes it easier for those who choose to follow; and so it is with wrongdoers who jump the bounds of sin and folly. They are teaching those who follow to shun the plain, open path, and to take to the walls, fences, and ditches, which end in a broken neck, amidst the applause of fools.

Hotbeds of envy and hatred, heated with burning passion, have been productive of more evil results, direful consequences, bloodshed, cruel deaths, and foul murders than all the poison extracted from fungi, hemlock, foxgloves, and deadly nightshade have done since the world began, or could do, even if envy and hatred were to die to-day and poisons worked death to the end of time.

The morals and good deeds of a wicked, sensual, selfish man are the artificial flowers of hell.

Some professing Christians have only sufficient Christianity to make a pocket mirror, which the possessor uses in company as a schoolboy would to make “Jack-a-dandies.”

Crowns of credit or renown lightly won sit lightly upon the head, and are easily puffed off by the first breath of public opinion.

A man who trusts to his own self-righteousness to get him to heaven is wheeling a heavily and unevenly laden wheelbarrow up a narrow, slippery plank over a deep ravine, with a wheel in the front of his wheelbarrow that is twisted, loose, and awry.

The devil plays most with those he means to bite the hardest.

Singing heavenly songs in earthly sorrows brings joy tinged with the golden light of heaven on the mourner.

To get the cold, poisonous water of selfishness from our hearts God has often to furrow and drain our nature and affections by afflictions and cross purposes.

Too-much conceited young Christians with little piety, like young “quickset” hedges, become of more use to the Christian Church and the world after they have been cut down by persecution and bent by troubles and afflictions.

Sin in the first instance is as playful as a kitten and as harmless as a lamb; but in the end it will bite more than a tiger and sting more than a nest of wasps.

A Christian professor outside the range of miracles and under the influence of the devil is he who is trying to swim to heaven with a barrel of beer upon his back.

As fogs are bad conductors of light, sight, and sound, so in like manner is a Christian living in foggy doubts a bad conductor of the light, sight, and sounds of heaven.

Cold, slippery Christians who have no good object before them, and without a noble principle to guide them, are like round balls of ice on a large dish; and to set such Christians to work is a worse task than serving the balls out with a knitting needle.

Crotchety, doubting, scientific Christians are manufacturers of more deadly poisons than that produced from pickled old rusty nails.

The loudest and most quickening sounds to be heard upon earth are from a beautiful sweet child as it lies in the stillness of the loving arms of death.

Breakfast being over, with my “Gladstone bag” I begun my tramp-trot to the “course,” and while walking leisurely under the tall trees in one of the avenues at Leamington, on my way to the racecourse, a circumstance occurred—which my friend the gipsies say “forbodes good luck and a fortune, and that I shall rise in the world and have many friends.” Gipsies say and do queer things. To see, say they, the tail of the first spring lamb instead of its face forebodes “bad luck” to the beholder through the year. In the tramcar there was a little dog with a silver collar round its neck, evidently without an owner. The pretty little white English terrier whined about in quest of its master or mistress, but neither was to be found. In the tramcar there was a police inspector on his way to do double duty at the racecourse. This kind-hearted man tried hard by coaxing, sop, and caresses to be a friend to the dog; but no, and for the life of him the dog could not be brought round to look upon the inspector as a friend. Immediately the tramcar stopped, the little dog bounded off in search of its owner, but none was to be found, and the last I saw of the inspector and the lost dog was up one of the streets at Warwick, with the dog ahead and its tail between its legs, and the inspector scampering after it as fast as he could run, calling out, “Stop it,” “Stop it,” “It’s lost;” and away they both went out of sight, and neither the one nor the other have I seen since.

I once worked for a master in the slave yards of Brickdom in Staffordshire, who owned a bulldog. This dog took it into his head one day to leave its cruel master, and seek fresh lodgings of a better kind. Spying its opportunity, off it started out of the brickyard as if it was shot out of a gun; and the master for whom I slaved could not whistle, and knowing that I could whistle as well as I could cry and sing, bawled out to me, “Whistle him, whistle him, or I’ll black your eye! I’ve lost a dog worth five shillings; whistle him!” Of course, under the circumstances, trembling with fear and fright, I could not “whistle” very loud. The consequence was, the dog was lost, and I got a “good kick and a punch.” If the inspector could have whistled for the lost dog in the tones of its mistress, it would have saved his legs and brought the dog back to its comfortable home.

I was no sooner upon the racecourse, paddling through the quagmire, than I was brought face to face with some of the gipsies—the Hollands and the Claytons. I had not long been talking to them before one of the old Hollands came up to me and said, “I know who you are, Mr. Smith of Coalville; lend’s your hand, and let’s have a good shake. I would not mind giving five shillings for your likeness.” I told him he need not be at the expense of giving five shillings for a flattering photograph; he could have a good stare at the original, with all its faults, blemishes, and scars, for nothing. In my hands were a lot of picture cards for the gipsy children, given to me by the Religious Tract Society, upon which were a lot of texts of Scripture, in pretty patterns. Some of them read as follows: “My son, forget not my law;” “Thou art my trust from my youth;” “Thou God seest me;” “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet;” “My son, give me thine heart;” “Wisdom is more precious than rubies;” “Enter not into the path of the wicked;” “Even a child is known by his doings;” “Feed my lambs;” “Hear instruction, and be wise;” “Show piety at home;” “The Lord bless and keep thee;” “The Lord preserveth all them that love Him;” “I will guide thee with mine eye;” “The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil;” and many more. Immediately I had begun to distribute them among the children clustered round me, Alfred Clayton came up to me, as close as he could get, and he said, as I read out some of the texts to the children “I do like them; I could die by them; I’d sooner have some of them than a meal’s meat at any time. Do give me some, Mr. Smith, and I’ll get somebody to read them to me, and will take great care of them. I’ll have them framed and hung up.” The Hollands now asked me to go into their van, which invitation I gladly accepted. I was no sooner seated than Mrs. Holland, a big strong woman with pipe in her mouth, began to tell me how many children they had had, and that she had “been a nurse for the Lord,” for she had “had twelve children, nine of whom had died before they were three years old, and three are living, two of whom you see.” At this point she flew off at a tangent in language not suited for this book. Any one hearing her would think that she was a somewhat queer and strange kind of “nurse for the Lord.” Mr. Holland the elder told me of one poor gipsy woman, who, through her unfaithfulness and bad conduct, had come to an untimely end, so much so that it was with much difficulty and risk her rotten remains were placed in a coffin. Sad to say, her sins were not buried with her. Her family carry the marks upon them. After chatting about all sorts of things and old times, with the Leicestershire gipsies from Barlestone and Barwell, I turned in with some gipsy Smiths from Gloucestershire, whose van and tents were on the other side of the “grand stand.” I found that in three of the vans there were twenty-one children of various sizes and ages, and nine men and women sleeping and huddling together in wretchedness. One of the gipsy women told me that she had had “nineteen children all born alive.” As they sat round the fire upon the grass, I began to give them some cards, and while I was doing so, one of the men, Reservoir Smith, broke out in language not very elevating, and said among other things, “What use are picture cards to either the children or us; there is not one in the whole bunch that can tell a letter; and as for saying prayers, they do not know what it is and where to begin. We cannot pray ourselves, much less teach our children. Who are we to pray to? Parsons pray, and not we poor folks.” A gipsy woman must needs have her say in the matter, and said as follows, “Do not mind what he says master, if you will give me some of the cards we will have them framed; they will do to look at if we cannot read them.” At this they clustered round me—men, women and children; and I distributed cards and pence to the little ones as far as my stock would allow, with which all were delighted.

In the midst of this large group of idle men and women, ragged, dirty, unkempt, and ignorant children with matted hair, there were two of the Smith damsels—say, of about eighteen or twenty years—dressed in all the gay and lively colours imaginable, whose business was not to attend to the cocoa-nut “set outs,” but to wheedle their way with gipsy fascination amongst the crowd of race-goers, to gain “coppers” in all sorts of questionable ways of those “greenhorns” who choose to listen to their “witching” tales of gipsydom. Their “lurchers” and “snap” dogs came and smelt at my pantaloons, and skulked away with their tails between their legs.

Upon the course there were over thirty adult gipsies, and nearly forty children living in tents and vans, and connected in one way or other with the gipsy Smiths, Greens, Hollands, Stanleys, and Claytons, not one of whom—excepting one Stanley—could read and write a simple sentence out of any book, and attended neither a place of worship nor any Sunday or day school. When I explained to them the plan I proposed for registering their vans, and bringing the children within reach of the schoolmaster, they one and all agreed to it without any hesitation, and said as follows, that “it would be the best thing in the world, and unitedly expressed more than once, ‘Thank you, sir,’ ‘Thank you, sir.’”

Rain was now coming down, and the races were about to commence; therefore my gipsy congregation had begun to find its way to the various cocoa-nut establishments to begin business in earnest. With this exodus going on around me, and in the midst of oaths, swearing, betting, banging, cheating, lying, shouting, and thrashing, I turned quickly into Alfred Clayton’s van to have a friendly chat with him with “closed doors.” The conversation I had with him earlier in the afternoon led me to think that some kind of influence had been at work with him that one does not see in a thousand times among gipsies. Evidently a softening process had taken hold of him which I wanted to hear more about. With his wife and another gipsy friend in charge of his cocoa-nut business, we closed the door of the van, and he began his tale in answer to my questions. I asked him whether they had always been gipsies. To which he answered as follows: “My grandfather was a ‘stockiner’ at Barlestone, and lived in a cottage there; but in course of time he began to do a little hawking, first out of a basket round the villages, and then in a cart round the country. He then took to a van; and the same thing may be said of the Claytons. Originally they were ‘stockiners’ at Barwell, a village close to Barlestone, and began to travel as my grandfather and father had done. Thus you will see that the two families of gipsies, Claytons and Hollands, are mixed up pretty much. My father is, as you know, a Holland, and my mother a Clayton, whose name I take. At the present time, out of the original family of Hollands at Barlestone, and the original family of Claytons at Barwell, there are seven families of Hollands travelling the country at the present time, and fifteen families of Claytons travelling in various parts of Staffordshire and other places.” From the original two families it will be seen that there are over a hundred and fifty men, women, and children who have taken to gipsying within the last fifty years, not half a dozen of whom can read and write, with all the attendant consequences of this kind of a vagabond rambling life; which the more we look into, it is plain that Christianity and civilization, as we have put them forth to reclaim those of our own brothers and sisters near home, have proved a failure, not on account of the blessed influences of themselves being not powerful enough, but in the lack of the application of them to the gipsies by those who profess to have received those world-moving principles in their hearts. In the midst of this dark mass of human beings moving to and fro upon our lovely England, one little cheering ray is to be seen. Alfred Clayton tells us this. When he was staying at Leicester with his van some three years since, he stole like a thief in the night into the “Salvation Warehouse” at the bottom of Belgrave Gate, and while he was there an influence penetrated through the hardened coats of ignorance and crime, and the ramification of sin in all its worst shape to the depth of his heart, and awakened a chord of sympathy in his nature which has not died out, or wholly left him to this day. “Jesus the name high over all” caused him to open his ears in a manner they had never been opened before, and wonder what it all meant. This visit to the “Salvation warehouse” was not lost upon him, or without its effects upon his conduct. One cold wintry day, some two years ago, he was staying with his wife and family in this van on the roadside between Atherstone and Hinckley, when a youth, apparently about eighteen years old, came limping along the road, dressed in what had once been a fashionable suit of clothes, but now was little better than rags. His face was thin and pale, and his fingers long, and his neck bare. Upon his feet were two odd old worn-out shoes, and without stockings upon his legs; and as the forlorn youth neared the van and its occupants at dusk, he said, “Will you please give me a bit of bread, for I feel very hungry.” Clayton said, without much inquiry and hesitation, “Come into the van and warm yourself,” and while the youth was doing so, they got ready a crust of bread and cheese and some tea, which were devoured ravenously. Clayton learned that the stranger was related to one of the leading manufacturers named at Leicester, and well known as being rich; but unfortunately for the poor youth, his father died, and his stepmother had sold everything and cleared away to America, leaving this well-educated lad without any money, or means of earning money, to grapple with the world and its difficulties for a livelihood as best he could. Clayton, in the kindness of his heart, took the youth into the van, and he travelled up and down the country with them as one of their own during the space of two years, when owing to “his being a gentleman,” and a “capital scollard,” he was helpful to the gipsy family in more ways than one. After the two years’ gipsying spent by the youth with his kind friends the Claytons in rambling about the country, some kind friends at Atherstone took pity on him, and he is there to-day, gradually working his position back into civilized society, and a respectable member of the community, notwithstanding the treatment he has received at the hands of his cruel stepmother. After the meeting at the “Salvation Warehouse” Clayton had been seen and heard more than once, checking swearing and other sins so common to gipsies; but had never finally decided to leave gipsying and begin a better life until last Christmas. The steps which led up to his “great resolve,” he related to me as follows: “Mr. Smith, you must know that I have been about as bad a man as could be found anywhere. I felt at times, through drink and other things, that I would as soon murder somebody as I would eat my supper; in fact, I didn’t care what I did; and things went on in this way till my little girl, about three years old, and who I loved to the bottom of my heart, was taken ill and died. She had such bright eyes, a lovely face, and curls upon her head. She was my darling pet, and always met me with a smile; but she died and lies buried in Polesworth churchyard.” At this Clayton burst into crying and sobbing like a child. “I vowed,” said Clayton, “on the day, at the side of the grave, she, my poor darling, was buried, that I would not touch drink for a month, and do you know, Mr. Smith of Coalville, when the month was gone, I did not feel to crave for drink any more, and I have not had any up till now.” He now dried his eyes, and his face brightened up with a smile, and I said to him in the van, “Let us kneel down and thank God for helping you to make this resolution, and for grace to help you to keep it.” In the midst of the hum, shouting, and swearing of the races, we shut the door of the van; and after we had got off our knees, he knelt down again and again, and began to pray, with tears in his eyes, as follows:—

“O Lord Jesus, Thou knowest that I have been a bad sinner. O God, thou knowest I have been very wicked in many ways, and done many things I should not have done; but Thou hast told me to come to Thee and Thou wilt forgive me. Do my God forgive me for all the wrong I have done, and help me to be a better man, and never touch drink again any more, for Thou knowest it has been my ruin. Help me to live a good life, so that I may meet my little darling in heaven, who lies in Polesworth churchyard. Do, O Lord, bless my wife and my other little children, and make them all good. Oh do, my heavenly Father help my mother to give over swearing and bad things. Thou canst do it. Do Thou bless my father, and my brothers, and all my relations, and Mr. Smith in his work, and for being so good to us, so that we may all meet in heaven, for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

“Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.”

After Clayton had dried his eyes we got up, to behold, over the top of the bottom half of his van door, the riders, dressed in red, scarlet, yellow, green, blue, crimson, and orange, with a deep black shade to be seen underneath, galloping to hell with hordes of gamblers at their heels as fast as their poor, cruelly treated steeds could carry them, all leaving footprints behind them for young beginners to follow. I said to Clayton, “Are you not tired of this kind of life?” And he said he was. “It is no good for anybody,” said Clayton, “and I am going to leave it. This is my last day with the ‘cocoa-nuts.’ I shall start in the morning—Saturday—for Coventry and Atherstone, where I mean to settle down and bring my children up like other folks. I have taken a house and am going to furnish it, and a gentleman is going to give me a chance of learning a trade, for which I thank God.”

As the shouts of the hell-bound multitude were dying away, and the gains and losses reckoned up, Clayton’s three little gipsy children, with their lovely features, curls, and bright blue eyes, came toddling up the steps to the van door, calling out, “Dad, let us in; dad, let us in.” The door was opened, and the little dears comfortably seated by our side. I gave them a few pictures, some coppers, stroked their hair, and “chucked their chin,” and bade them good-bye in the midst of a shower of rain, to meet again some day with the bright sun shining overhead and a clear sky without a cloud to be seen anywhere. For the present I must say with John Harris in his Wayside Pictures—

“Where Thou leadest it is best;
Cheer me with the thought of rest,
Till I gain the upper shore,
And my tent is struck no more.”

Rambles among the Gipsies at Boughton Green Fair.

I HAD heard much and often about the Boughton Green Fair, and the vast number of gipsies, semi-gipsies, and other tramps, scamps, vagabonds, hawkers, farmers, tradesmen, the fast and loose, riff-raff and respectable, gathered together from all quarters once a year upon this ancient Green for a “fairing.” Tradesmen and farmers exhibited their wares, live stock, and implements of husbandry; and others set forth their articles of torture, things of fashion, painted faces, “tomfoolery,” and “bosh,” to those who like to tramp thither in sunshine and storm with plenty of money in their pockets for revel and debauch.

Bidding the sparrows, linnets, swallows, and wagtails, fluttering and darting round our dwelling, good-bye as they were hopping, chirping, twittering, and gathering a variety of materials upon which to build their nests; and with my little folks at the door, I wended my way to the station.

“Then he kissed his olive branches,
Bade his wife good-bye,
And said, . . .
‘Heaven preserve you all!’”

Wayside Pictures (Harris).

The sun was shining warmly, the roads dusty, and a few red faces covered with perspiration were to be seen panting along. Many of the men were dressed in black cloth, a little faded, of the “cut” and fashion out of date many years ago. Some had their coats hung upon their arm, with white shirt sleeves and heavy boots everywhere visible. Most fairly well-to-do farm labourers have for Sundays and mourning days a black suit, which lasts them for many years. In some instances the father’s black clothes become family “heirlooms”—at any rate, for a time—and then, when the father dies, they are turned into garments for the little children. Of course the father’s “black silk furred hat” cannot be made less, and to pad it to make it fit little Johnny’s head is an awkward process. I have seen many little boys with big hats upon their heads in my time. I suppose they have imagined that people would infer that they had big heads under the hats with plenty of brain power. This is a mistake. Big hats, with little brain and less common sense, and No. 10 rather high, often go together. Upon the road would be “Our Sal” with her “chap,” and his brother Jim, yawning, shouting, and gaping along, and, as my friends the boatmen would say, “a little beerish.” Some of the country labouring girls would have their shawls upon their arms, and they would be stalking along in their strong boots at the rate of four miles an hour, frolicking and screaming as Bill Sands, Jack Jiggers, Joe Straw, Matt Twist, and Ben Feeder jostled against them. They seemed to delight in showing the tops of their boots, with crumpled and overhanging stockings. There were other occupants of the road trudging limpingly after the cows, sheep, horses, donkeys, and mules, called “tramps” and “drovers,” who seemed to be, and really are, the “cast-offs” of society. These poor mortals were, as a rule, either as thin as herrings or as bloated as pigs, with faces red with beer-barrel paint; and they wore gentlemen’s “cast-off” clothing in the last stages of consumption, with rags flying in the wind. Their once high-heeled boots were nearly upside down, while dirty toes, patches, and rag-stuffing were everywhere visible.

In the train there was the usual jostle, bustle, and crush, and gossip. At Northampton station there was no little commotion, owing to the station-master having closed the station-yard against all cabs except those who ply regularly between the station and the town.

One cabman came to me and said that he would take me to the Green for a less fare than he charged others if I would get into his cab the first. I asked him his reason. “Because,” he said, “if you get in first others will follow, and I shall soon have a load.” I could not see the force of his argument, and found my way to another cab. I had no sooner seated myself than the cabman took off, or hid, his number. I asked him why he did that. His answer was, “So that if I drive fast the Bobbies shan’t catch the sight of my number. If they get my number and I am caught driving fast there will be either thirty ‘bob’ for me to pay, or I shall have to go to ‘quad’ for a fortnight.”

Some of the poor horses attached to the vehicles—cabs, waggonettes, carriers carts, carriages—were heavily laden with human beings, till they could scarcely crawl. Uphill, down dale, slashing, dashing, banging, whipping, kicking, and shouting seemed to be the order of the day; and on this vast mass of human and animal life poured—and myself among the crowd—till I found we were fairly among the gipsies upon the Green.

Having partaken of a starvation lunch in one of the booths, consisting of “reecy” fat ham, with a greasy knife and fork, dried bread and lettuce, served upon plates not over clean, and studded and painted with patches of mustard left by a former customer, and with warm ginger-beer as tame as skim milk to take the place of champagne, I began to take stock of the Green, which natural formation, together with those made apparently hundreds of years ago, seemed to excite my first attention.

The large circular holes, of about thirty feet diameter and one foot below the level of the surrounding ground, reminded me very much of ancient gipsy encampments. Boughton Green has been a favourite annual camping ground for generations, and may to-day be considered as the fluctuating capital of gipsydom in the Midlands, where the gipsies from all the Midland and many other counties do annually congregate to fight, quarrel, brawl, pray, sing, rob, steal, cheat, and, in past times, murder.

According to Wetton’s “Guide to Northamptonshire,” published some fifty-six years ago, it seems probable that the fair was formerly set out in canvas streets, after the manner of a maze, shepherd’s-race, or labyrinth; and as Boughton Green was close to a Roman station, this seems probable. This was the custom of the Roman fairs held close to their stations. This much seems to be inferred from Baker’s “History of Northamptonshire,” where he says, “The stretching canvas forms the gaudy streets.”

In the Northampton Mercury, June 5, 1721, the following advertisement appears: “The Right Hon. the Earl of Strafford has been pleased to give a bat, value one guinea, to be played for on Monday at cudgels, and another of the same price; and also 6 pairs of buckskin gloves at 5s. a pair, to be wrestled for on Tuesday; and a silver cup of the value of 5 guineas price to be run for on Wednesday by maiden galloways not exceeding 14 hands high, during the time of Boughton Fair. The ladies of the better rank to meet to raffle, see the shows, and then to adjourn to a ball at the Red Lion Inn, Northampton, in the evening.”