I DO not think the old Drill Hall in Birkenhead has ever been a cheerful place: deserted by the military and transformed into a boxing booth, it is now positively dismal. But for two months during the summer of 1911 it was ablaze with Oriental colour. Kola, the Gypsy chieftain, with his tribe of coppersmiths, had taken possession of it, having left the English Romany camp at Tranmere to make room for his brothers, Yantshi and Yishwan, who had arrived from Marseilles with their wives, children and followers. The ruling family had established itself upon the high platform where once bruisers proved their mettle, and from it the royal tenant looked down a crooked lane bordered on either side by the tents of his subjects. From irregular skylights in the black roof dusty, mysterious sunbeams fell upon gay drapery and piles of eiderdown beds gaudily covered with scarlet and yellow stuff, on black-bearded men and strange groups of dark women in bright red dresses loaded with gold, on the little low round tables at which they sat cross-legged, and on the blue tendrils of smoke that rose from their brass samovars. In the yard outside was the din of many hammers beating cauldrons of copper, but it was almost drowned by a babel of shrill voices quarrelling in a strange and strongly aspirated tongue. [Picture: Worsho. Photo. by F. A. Cooper] For all was not well in Kola’s kingdom: disaffection was brewing, and a schism was imminent. And in the midst of all the trouble the wife of young Worsho Kokoiesko presented her husband with a little brown girl, his first child. No stranger ever knew what secret rites were practised in the distant corner of the great barn where Worsho, as a poor relation, lived humbly. Mother and child were screened carefully from observation, and the first token of the arrival of a new recruit was the healthy voice of a crying baby. There was no general rejoicing, no excitement; but Worsho slipped shyly to my side and, in his rich mellow voice which resembled singing rather than speaking, invited me to be godfather.