I espied a dinner-party; father, mother, and seven children were seated on the ground busy with their mid-day meal of bacon and potatoes. An old bucket, with some holes knocked in the sides and the bottom well perforated, was their cooking-stove; an iron pot and a rusty frying-pan their only utensils. A piece of bacon in one hand and a potato in the other, they all seemed to be enjoying themselves. The man I found to be an old acquaintance, for he had been charged with cruelty to a donkey. The donkey, I believe, died, though I did not see it; but I have the word of the police and that of a respected veterinary for the fact that the donkey did die. ‘Hello, Gamble!’ I said. ‘You seem to be having a good time of it. All these children yours?’ ‘Yes, all born in that caravan.’ ‘But you don’t all sleep in it?’ ‘Oh no; only missus and myself and one or two of ’em.’ ‘Where do the others sleep?’ ‘Oh, we take the shafts off the van, and put these sheets all round, and they sleep under it; it is better than a tent.’ ‘How do you get on for clean water?’ I asked, for I knew that the East London Water Company had served notices upon the people living in the neighbourhood against supplying the Arcadians with water. Gamble looked a bit shy, and said: ‘Oh, we manage it;’ but he was not disposed to tell me how. At another caravan I found three generations--a very old couple, husband and wife evidently; a younger man, with his wife and four children; these children also slept under the van in which they were born. The old couple had a gipsy tent, and the younger couple the van, the outside of which was covered with their merchandise. Not a single child at either van could read or write; none of them had ever been to school. I went on to the gipsy tents. At the door of one a middle-aged woman sat on an empty packing-case tying up bundles of grass, which had been previously dyed a startling colour. She had no children, and said her husband had died a year ago. They had lived in that tent together, and had two children; but both of them died. ‘I suppose you will be married again soon?’ I said, looking at her. She said she thought not, for she did not have a very good time with the first.