Field and Hedgerow: Being the Last Essays of Richard JefferiesJefferies, Richard
History
Field and Hedgerow: Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies
Jefferies, Richard
England -- Description and travel; Natural history
visitors could go in or out without being grossly insulted, without rhyme
or reason, merely for the sake of blackguardism. Now, the pure gipsy in
his tent or the Anglo-Saxon labourer would not do this; it was the
half-breed. The original owner was driven from his premises; and they are
said to have changed hands several times since from the same cause. All
over the parish this half-breed element shows its presence by the
extraordinary and unusual coarseness of manner. The true English rustic
is always civil, however rough, and will not offend you with anything
unspeakable, so that at first it is quite bewildering to meet with such
behaviour in the midst of green lanes. This is the explanation--the gipsy
taint. Instead of the growing population obliterating the gipsy, the
gipsy has saturated the English folk.
When people saw the red man driven from the prairies and backwoods of
America, and whole states as large as Germany without a single Indian
left, much was written on the extermination of the aborigines by the
stronger Saxon. As the generations lengthen, the facts appear to wear
another aspect. From the intermarriage of the lower orders with the
Indian squaws the Indian blood has got into the Saxon veins, and now the
cry is that the red man is exterminating the Saxon, so greatly has he
leavened the population. The typical Yankee face, as drawn in _Punch_, is
indeed the red Indian profile with a white skin and a chimney-pot hat.
Upon a small scale the same thing has happened in this village by the
forest; the gipsy half-breed has stained the native blood. Perhaps races
like the Jew and gipsy, so often quoted as instances of the permanency of
type, really owe that apparent fixidity to their power of mingling with
other nations. They are kept alive as races by mixing; otherwise one of
two things would happen--the Jew and the gipsy must have died out, or
else have supplanted all the races of the globe. Had the Jews been so
fixed a type, by this time their offspring would have been more numerous
than the Chinese. The reverse, however, is the case; and therefore we may
suppose they must have become extinct, had it not been for fresh supplies
of Saxon, Teuton, Spanish, and Italian blood. It is, in fact, the
inter-marriages that have kept the falsely so-called pure races of these
human parasites alive. The mixing is continually going on. The gipsies
who still stay in their tents, however, look askance upon those who
desert them for the roof. Two gipsy women, thorough-bred, came into a
village shop and bought a variety of groceries, ending with a pound of
biscuits and a Guy Fawkes mask for a boy. They were clad in dirty jackets
and hats, draggle-tails, unkempt and unwashed, with orange and red
kerchiefs round their necks (the gipsy colours). Happening to look out of
window, they saw a young servant girl with a perambulator on the opposite
side of the 'street;' she was tidy and decently dressed, looking after
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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