Gipsy Life: Being an account of our Gipsies and their children, with suggestions for their improvementSmith, George
History
Gipsy Life: Being an account of our Gipsies and their children, with suggestions for their improvement
Smith, George
Romanies -- Great Britain
a Gipsy camp, until the moment we parted at night, Mr. Smith thought of
nothing, spoke of nothing, remembered nothing, saw nothing, but what had
some relation to the Gipsies and their mode of life. The Zulus were to
be pitied because theirs was a sort of Gipsy life; and the Gipsies’ tents
were nothing more than kraals. All his stories were of what Gipsies he
had met, and what they had said; and even our fellow-travellers in the
train were only noticeable because they looked like some Gipsy man or
woman whom he had met elsewhere. We had a short ride by rail, and a
tramp through a densely-populated district, and then we came to the
camping-ground we wanted. It was a spacious yard, entered through a
gate, and surrounded with houses, whose back yards formed the enclosure.
There were three caravans and three kraals erected there, and as it was
Sunday afternoon nearly all the inhabitants were at home. Those who were
absent were a few children able to go to Sunday-school, whither they went
of their own free will and with the approval of their parents. The
kraals were not all constructed on the same pattern—two were circular in
form and the third was square. This was on the right hand at entering,
and had at one time been a tumble-down shelter for a calf, who had many
years before gone the way of all beef—into a butcher’s shop. There were
tiles on the low roof—in places—but plenty of openings were left for the
rain to come in, and for the smoke from the fire in the bucket to find a
way out if it chose. The floor was common earth, and very uneven in
places. Alice, the mistress of this abode, was a woman over fifty, with
a face the colour of leather, and vigour enough to do any amount of work.
As we entered, she told Mr. Smith a piteous tale of the loss of her
spectacles, without which she solemnly declared she could not read a
line. She left the spectacles one day when she was going ‘hopping,’
hidden under a tile above her head, and when she returned the case was
there, but the spectacles were gone. She carried her licence to hawk in
her spectacle-case, until the time came when she could happily beg the
gift of a pair of new ones. Her husband, a white-haired old man, with a
look of innocent wonder in his face, sat on a lump of wood, warming his
hands over the fire. He said little—his wife scarcely allowing an
opportunity for any one else to speak—but seemed to consider that he was
a fortunate man in having such a remarkable wife. There was a handsome
young woman sitting in the only chair in the place, daughter of the old
couple; and her brother lay extended on a bed made of indescribable
things in one portion of the cabin, where the tiles in the roof showed no
openings to the sky. His wife, a thoroughbred Gipsy, sat nursing a
baby—their first-born—on the edge of the bed. The wood walls were
covered with old clothes, sacking, and a variety of odd things, fastened
in their places by wooden skewers, and adorned with a few pots and pans
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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