“The gloss has long been taken off the picture which imaginative persons used to varnish for themselves as to the Romany. Nor, perhaps is any country in Europe so little fitted for these gentry as ours. England is every year becoming more and more enclosed, and the spaces which are not enclosed are more and more carefully looked after. Whether in our climate open-air living was ever thoroughly satisfactory is a question not easy to answer. But even if we admit that it might have been merry in good greenwood under the conditions picturesquely described in ballads, the admission does not extend to the present day. There is no good greenwood now, except a few insignificant patches, which are pretty sharply preserved; and the killing of game, except on a small scale and at considerable risk, is difficult. The cheapness of modern manufactures has interfered a good deal with the various trades of mending, mankind having made up their minds that it is better to buy new things and throw them away when they fail than to have them patched and cobbled. Fortune-telling is a resource to some extent, but even this is meddled with by the Gorgio and his laws. The _raison d’être_ of the vagabond Gipsy is getting smaller and smaller in England, and as this goes on the likelihood of his practices becoming more and more undisguisedly criminal is obvious. The best way to prevent this is, of course, to catch him young and educate him. A century or two ago the innate Bohemianism of the race might have made this difficult, if not impossible. But it is clear that even if the Gipsy blood has not been largely crossed during their four centuries of residence in England, other influences have been sufficient to work upon them. If they can live in towns at all, they can live in them after the manner of civilised townsmen. A Gipsy at school suggests odd ideas, and one might expect that the pupils would imitate some day or other, though less tragically, the conduct of that promising South African prince who, the other day, solemnly took off his trousers (as a more decisive way of shaking our dust from his feet), and began vigorously to kill colonists. But it is by no means certain that this would be the case. The old order of Gipsy life has, in England, at any rate, become something of an impossibility and everything of a nuisance. It has ceased to be even picturesque.”