The flowers are picked while the buds are still unopened; during the evening one may see the family seated around the fire, each one dipping the flower stalks in a saucepan of hot water; they are then laid aside until the morning, when they are rapidly and neatly bunched for sale. Flowers which are forced open in this manner do not, of course, last nearly so long as those which open naturally; but this does not disturb the gypsy, who is usually too intently concerned with the bread-and-jam aspect of the matter to be worried by such a trifle. I was once photographing some gypsy fellows who were occupied in bunching “daffies,” as they term them, when something went wrong with the mechanism of my camera which necessitated the taking out of all the plates for the removal of the obstruction. Here was a predicament; I was nearly seven miles from home with no means of proceeding with my work unless I could take all the plates from my camera, correct it, and replace them in order. I decided therefore to risk doing it if by any method whatever a dark “room” could be improvised, so, kneeling upon the ground with my camera, the gypsy folk piled around and over me, sacks, tent blankets, hay, daffodil bags and what not, while my companion contributed a coat to supplement my own, then darkness seemed complete and with misgivings I did what my sense of touch indicated as being needed and recharged the camera,—but oh, the stuffiness and the heat of my dark tent, to think of it even now gives me a sensation of being suffocated. My companion took toll for the use of his coat by snapshotting me while in the “dark room”; perhaps the picture opposite may be more correctly described as the dark room while I was in it.