Let us for a few moments consider the hard lot of the tent-dwelling gypsy family, the members of which make a few different articles in their season,—the wife, and possibly a child or two, after having assisted to make a stock, hawk the things around for sale while the man stays at home and makes more. When one takes into consideration the many weary miles tramped, the hours and days worked through, and the few pence realized for it all, it will be obvious that certain kinds only of home-made articles can be hawked about to advantage, that is to say, they must be of such kinds as can be made from raw material costing little or nothing beside labour to procure. Great ingenuity is displayed in piecing together all sorts of natural or manufactured odds and ends into something that shall be sufficiently novel, attractive or useful, to bring about the transfer of small coin from the gorgios to themselves. One day they will be selling—perhaps it would be more exact to say, trying to dispose of for next to nothing—little brooms neatly made of heather or whips made of plaited rushes, the _Juncus communis_ of botanists. At another time they may be seen burdened with grass doormats, and it is not an uncommon occurrence for a gypsy woman to carry many miles in one day, a heavy baby on one side, and on the other a large basket of cottons, tapes, laces, etc., with one or more of these grass mats, while another child may have a reserve of two or three more. These mats, which are very often sold for threepence each, contain a really large quantity of dry grass stems tightly bound and woven together with strips of fresh bark of the bramble. Try and imagine the amount of work involved in the production of one of these threepenny serviceable mats:— The man usually walks several miles out and back for a supply of grass which is of a certain kind and is only locally abundant; he has to gather the blackberry stems—not an attractive pastime—and prepare the long strips of bark, manufacture the mat,—a hand-hardening if not a heart-breaking operation; finally, the mat is carried around, often for hours before being sold, and is sometimes even carried back to camp to go around again, to be sold at last for threepence. I know an old gypsy, seventy years of age, who in the proper season walks to a spot eight miles distant from his usual camping ground to gather those attractive purple plumes—the flowers of the common reed, _Arundo phragmites_. After wading into the mud and water and cutting a stock of the flowering stems and carrying them the eight miles to his camp—sixteen miles in all—he cuts them into suitable lengths, bunches them up and binds them neatly with some of the leaves, and afterwards carries them around to sell at one penny the bunch.